Marcado predominio del tiempo de tránsito normal sobre el lento

As part of the RMA Section 3258 _{analysis needed to justify the proposed regulations, WRC}

commissioned a report on the cost to farmers of restricting nitrogen discharges from farms in the Catchment. Findlayson & Thorrold (2001), who undertook the report, concluded that intensification of land use is a profitable option for farmers in this Catchment so regulatory control (rather than a voluntary approach) would be necessary to stop increased nitrogen leaching. They acknowledged, however, that such controls would result in substantial costs for farmers and could lead to reduced

57 _{See Section 5.4.1}

58 _{Section 32 of the Resource Management Act requires (Ministry for the Environment, 2014b):}

• new proposals must be examined for their appropriateness in achieving the purpose of the RMA

• the benefits and costs, and risks of new policies and rules on the community, the economy and the environment need to be clearly identified and assessed

• the analysis must be documented, so stakeholders and decision-makers can understand the rationale for policy choices.

The Resource Management Amendment Act 2013 introduced new requirements under s32. These new requirements do not change the purpose of s32. They do however encourage quantification of costs and benefits, emphasise the need to assess economic costs and benefits, and generally require a more robust, more clearly articulated analysis that is proportionate to the type of proposal.

farm viability. In 2002, TLC commissioned a report on the effects of three methods of achieving a 20% reduction in nitrogen discharges on farming in the Catchment. The three options were a cap, a 10% reduction by all farmers or a 20% reduction by all. The report made it clear that farmers would face losses no matter which implementation method was used but that a cap would result in the least cost to farmers i.e. $96m for cap and trade compared with $175m for the 20% reduction on

each farm59 _{(Nimmo-Bell, 2002). The major contributor to these losses, the authors concluded, was}

the inability of farmers to change to more intensive land-uses. Clearly a cap was the least unpalatable option for farmers.

The policy solution put to the government in 2003 was a restriction on nitrogen discharges, supported by land-use changes on government owned land in the Catchment (Yerex, 2009). In the event, the government decided not to use the government (Landcorp) farms for this purpose and instead agreed to contribute to a fund to assist with land-use change in the Catchment. This decision put the onus back onto the landowners in the Catchment to make appropriate land-use changes on privately owned land in order to reduce the nitrogen load to the Lake. Should WRC now opt for a command and control policy? The farmers argued that this would limit their ability to manage their land and earn an income. But there was support from the TLC consultation team (and by extension from the farmers of the Catchment) for a cap and trade system since it provided the flexibility that a command and control system could not. Cap and trade allowed tailored solutions to be devised for individual farms by the farmers themselves. As one farmer told WRC (Yerex, 2009: 20):

We accept there is an issue, but don’t tell us how to farm, tell us what you want to achieve and we’ll figure out how to farm to achieve it.

Nevertheless, a cap was seen by farmers as a reduction of property rights (Federated Farmers, 2008). Others, however, considered that the introduction of a trading scheme effectively privatised a public resource (Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, 2006).

An important addition to the cap and trade regime was the introduction of the Lake Taupo

Protection Trust60_{. The Trust, eventually operative in February 2007, was to administer an $81.5}

million fund provided by central and local government and was charged with developing a

programme of work to reduce the amount of manageable nitrogen leaching into the Lake by 20 per cent.

59 _{These values do not include the expected (but unquantified) loss in land values.}

60 _{The Trust reports to the Government (Ministry for the Environment, Ngati Tuwharetoa, the Taupo District}

Council, and Waikato Regional Council. Retrieved February 20, 2017 from:

In July 2005 the Waikato Regional Council, as required under the RMA, issued (i.e. notified) the proposed regulations and advised that submissions for and against the proposed variation to the Regional Plan needed to be received by September of that year. In choosing to implement a cap and trade system as a key feature of Variation 5, the Waikato Regional Council aimed to maintain the Lake water quality at 2001 levels, whilst minimising costs, and mitigating social and cultural effects (Waikato Regional Council, no date a). Social and cultural effects were to be mitigated by grand-

parenting the cap61 _{and so allowing farmers to continue with current farm systems and by trading,}

which allows flexibility in land-use management. A 20% reduction in Catchment nitrogen output was to be achieved through nitrogen purchases funded by local and central government and

administered by the Lake Taupo Protection Trust.

The Council held Hearings about the proposed Variation in 2006, at which members of the public could talk to the Council in support of their submission, and released their decision in 2007. The regulations were to remain largely as set out in the proposal. Appeals to the Environment Court were heard in 2008 and the Court released its final judgement, in favour of Variation 5, in 2011. There was considerable argument, both in and out of the Hearings and the Court, about the details of the Variation (e.g. whether to grandparent discharge allowances, which years to choose for

benchmarking and whether to include forestry in the scheme), but the overall policy direction

remained true to the 2005 proposal. TLC, however, was successful in arguing that the years on which the nitrogen allowance calculation would be made should be changed because of unusual weather events, as this ex-committee member explains:

The biggest achievement of TLC was to get [nitrogen allowances based on] the best year (2001 to 2005) rather than the average [of those years]. There were some drought years in there that would have made the average very low. TLC also bought us time (I thought it would all be done and dusted by 2001 or 2) and we farmers needed this time to understand it all. We got the best outcome that we could.

The Waikato Regional Council was pleased with the Court decision because the Variation, as confirmed by the Court, delivered three aspects that the Council considered crucial: a limit on nitrogen discharges from farming operations, the ability in law to enforce that limit and a publicly funded mechanism for reducing the overall amount of nitrogen entering the groundwater from farming sources. A key manager from WRC explains below (Yerex, 2009: 19):

Without a cap we can’t be assured that, under a monitoring regime, farmers are adhering to a benchmark. The policy needed all three components –

61 _{Daigneault, Greenhalgh, & Samarasinghe (2017) show that grand-parenting is less socially disruptive than}

being: the cap, a robust regulatory regime to enforce the cap, and the public money to assist the precedent setting change.

It is not the intention of this thesis to revisit all aspects of the process of developing Variation 5 since this has been well covered in other documents (particularly Yerex, 2009), however it should be noted that it was a bruising exercise for all concerned and the effects of that experience had not entirely faded when interviewing took place in 2013. Several interviewed farmers said that they were angry in the early 2000s and did not hesitate to let the Council know what they thought (often quite forcefully (Petch, Young, Thorrold & Vant, 2003)). As the years continued to pass without a decision, the uncertainty caused difficulties for some, as one farmer explained:

They [farmers wishing to exit] felt forced out [but] no-one would buy their farms and that was because the nitrogen rules hadn’t been established. It really drove a lot of them to the point of depression.

Some farmers, however, worked through their anger and managed to turn the situation to their

advantage, as this director of a Māori incorporation explains:

We got a sense that it [the regulations] wasn’t going to go away and we decided to front foot on it. … I guess that’s how we dealt with the nitrogen capping. After we stopped having a tantrum and we thought hard about it, we decided to make some money out of it - and we did.

The Waikato Regional Council appears to agree that the process could have been improved. In a water quality improvement scheme that they are implementing outside of the Taupo Catchment they are talking to farmers from the outset, as a key manager of the process explains below.

[The new project] is about restoring the Waikato River and perhaps too about doing things that we didn’t do right in Taupo - such as pre-warning farmers, helping them years in advance of regulations.

By 2011, the Variation 5 legal framework was complete. The Council had undertaken some work in advance of the Court decision, such as beginning to calculate the discharge allowance for each farm and the Lake Taupo Protection Trust had been set up and the trading of nitrogen could now begin.

Around the country the regulations were being recognised as “…ground-breaking and pioneering”

(Resource Management Law Association of New Zealand, 2011:2) and the WRC received an award in recognition of this from the Resource Management Law Association of New Zealand. It was hoped that they heralded a new era in water quality management in New Zealand.