Does it Matter?
For most waterways, everyone has a different opinion. One of the reasons for this is the lack of detailed data about the water quality, its variability and the impact water quality has on all users.
One universal concern for all users is the increasing number and size of toxic algal blooms in surface waters. Whether the contaminated water is used for irrigation of pasture, for swimming and water sports, or for animal or public water supplies these blooms are a high risk to all users.
Management pathways for algal bloom creation and movement based on data led science is a priority for Let's Be Clear Trust.
What is Missing?
What is missing is the detailed real time data to understand why and how these blooms and other river health issues develop in each waterway. This knowledge is critical to reducing their size and frequency.
Rapid detection of their presence, size and movement, is needed within or along a waterway. This allows pro-active notification to warn those likely to be affected and to ensure water testing and active management/notification activity is taken where this is practicable.
Only through knowing which factors combine to create blooms and determine their size can we all contribute ideas to improve management. This might be to move the location it is created, to reduce its size and duration, change the type of algae that dominates, or eliminate the bloom by managing one or more of the causes. All this helps to minimise negative impacts. What would it take to define the options available in your waterway at your location to manage or prevent algal blooms? This detail and the resulting knowledge and understanding that comes from it for all water, river, and lake users is what Let's Be Clear is committed to facilitating.
Water Contact Activities
Faecal coliforms from human and animal wastes and certain types of algae cause health risks from rashes through to liver damage.
Weed easily tangles around swimmers legs, particularly children, and is a risk to the control of boats and jet skis.
Dirty, weedy or algae laden water also limits visibility of submerged obstacles and perception of water depth.
Farming and Agriculture
Depending on the location and type of agricultural businesses, they can have an “out of proportion” impact on natural waterways and the costs borne by other water users.
New Zealand has high variability in soil types and subsoil conditions with this variation being extreme in areas of high historic volcanic activity. This complexity significantly increases the risk of unexpected negative outcomes from high intensity agriculture in particular.
Detailed and ongoing data driven evaluation of the impact of changes in land use are vital to downstream waterway health for these catchments. Unfortunately, they are largely non-existent.
Let’s Be Clear intends to change this situation. Detailed data may indicate little or no definable change and indicate agricultural intensity can be increased. It may also indicate the reverse and require significant reductions in intensity in some locations or other targeted mitigation activity to prevent environmental damage and high costs borne by others downstream.
Balancing of agricultural productivity with environmental conservation, public use, tourism, and other businesses reliant on good waterway quality is a key challenge for sustainable water management. Only knowledge based on detailed data can help determine reality and define the appropriate balance for all users.
This is the area of focus for Let’s Be Clear Trust.
Industry
Even compliant discharges of treated Industrial water often have significant impacts on rivers and lakes. They can affect water quality visually and biologically and reduce ecosystem health.
Events such as power outages or hardware failures in manufacturing processes can create spillages of high mass loads of nutrients and other contaminants for short periods of time. The discharge consent conditions, which are often based on composite sampling with additional allowances for occasional breaches are rarely if ever tested for impact on waterways during breaches. There is generally no requirement for continuous monitoring by the discharger to allow them to be aware of an accidental breach. There is rarely an internal diversion to storage of non-compliant water to prevent its release into the environment which compounds the lack of knowledge that it is occurring.
There is little information/knowledge on the short-term impact these events have on the local or downstream waterway health. Evaluation of these impacts on all waterway users, under the varying conditions present at the time of loss, is also a key focus for Let’s Be Clear Trust.
This provides the opportunity for improved understanding of policy on minimising negative outcomes.
Local and Central Government
What can our partners in Council, Environmental groups, and Industry teach us and what can we teach them?
Waterway health and water quality at any moment in time and place is largely unknown without appropriate real time monitoring and dynamic modelling.
Water experts cannot accurately predict outcomes of legislation change without this data. Those who question this only need to look to advances in weather prediction over the last 30 years through satellite and real time radar data.
We have not changed historic water monitoring practices from the monthly grab sample approach to keep pace with these advances in weather prediction.
This means we are using high risk methods to define policy and management of water which have proven internationally to take many years to fix.
We can all learn from each other by asking questions of regulators, their associated scientists and local councillors. The public must make real time information on impact available to those who can influence water quality via legislation or their actions.
Let’s Be Clear upload app allows your photos and included meta data to become evidence of waterway health at specific locations and times. Including a statement of its effect on you, your family, your business, or the health of a waterway can then be proactively made available to those tasked with managing it.
Without your input, there is no way to evaluate the holistic value/cost of waterway health.
River Communities and Businesses
The impacts of water quality tend to be highest on lake and riverside communities in New Zealand. They have more direct contact with the water and with food grown in it or by using it than others. Their higher reliability on the water results in greater negative impacts at lower contaminant levels.
An event which passes through a community over 24 hours is often only seen by chance by visitors if it occurs on a summer weekend. It affects the towns water supply taken from the waterway every day!
The ability of weed and other lake biology to store passing dissolved and suspended food means that the effects on the community continue well outside the 24-hour window. Weed and algae growth may be much higher than expected with ongoing negative consequences.
Real time knowledge on water quality in the region of lake/river communities and businesses allows evaluation of the real cost of even short-term events.
Water Treatment Costs
Most communities take their drinking water from the local waterway or water body, or an aquifer linked to that waterway.
Whether it is a river, lake, or underground aquifer, the worst-case water quality at the treatment plant defines the type of treatment processes and water storage capacity required. This means that the capital cost to the community rises with the worst-case water condition, not the average.
Similarly, this also impacts the operating cost to treat each litre of water. This will vary continuously as the source water quality changes however the lowest cost will always be higher for every litre.
These costs created by the those who contribute to reduced source water quality are rarely quantified or communicated to the users of treated water. They form part of the base water levy which all Councils charge in one form or another and also in the cost/kl of water used by individual users. Those creating this cost are often not aware of it due to a lack of the real time data linking them. This information can be extracted using the data Let’s Be Clear provides.
Collaboration
Where there is good communication within and between groups, a more complete understanding of the needs and the pathways to fulfil them is achieved.
Where sufficient data and understanding is available, agreement by all on an appropriate balance between these needs is more likely to be found.
Agreement results in more people working more effectively and innovatively to create the agreed condition more rapidly.
We work with all stakeholders to turn data into understanding of the waterway and communicate that through effective learning tools to all who want to understand it.
Let’s Be Clear works with all parties to determine what apparent barriers exist to open communication between stakeholders on the cause, effect, and costs of water quality issues on all stakeholders in a catchment.
We look to remove false barriers created through incomplete or out of context information to ensure all parties have a robust and full understanding of waterway behaviour, varying waterway health, and long-term wellbeing.
We work to find commonality between stakeholder goals and to ensure understanding by all of the opportunities and benefits of the formation of an inclusive and common set of goals and a united and balanced plan to achieve them.
When everyone understands the water system and a long-term commitment to it, it helps us all find that balance.
Examples and Articles
Linked Articles show a variety of examples of water quality health issues.
There is no one solution that fits all and a robust and holistic understanding of the short- and long-term risks and costs to all river users is needed to determine how to manage them.
Forestry Slash has been a recognised problem for many years, yet it took Cyclone Gabrielle for us to belatedly act and find solutions. Practical and cost-effective solutions were found within a year, simply by collaboration between people motivated to find them. None of these solutions can turn back the clock on the cost and damage already done to property and public wellbeing.
Solutions to our water quality and water health issues need to be looked for now, not in 10 years when the damage inflicted reaches cyclonic proportions. Let's not take a "Bottom of the Cliff" approach to Waterway Health!
If you want to help, contact us.
Currently there is a huge information gap on the extent of short term “event” based issues. Traditional monitoring is long term focused.
In addition to real time monitoring of water quality at targeted waterway locations
Let’s Be Clear intends to close this gap by inviting and advocating for public input on both good and bad water conditions via a soon to be released app specifically intended for this purpose.
The Mangakino Water Sports Club pre-empted us with the facebook page 
Upper Waikato River Health.
Algal images sequentially reported along a river system on this site allow us to track a moving algal bloom and see where “chunks” of it were pushed into lake side arms. Clean water conditions at the same locations allow visibility of how quickly the algal material clears.
So, all information that we can validate via meta data for time and location is good information and ensures a balanced and realistic understanding of waterway conditions which is central to understanding and the formation of any management plan!
Lake Maratei - Mangakino Boat Ramp
"Unsuitable for Swimming Cyanobacterial samples are taken during swimming season (November to March). These can rapidly bloom to harmful levels. Play it safe - if you can see blooms avoid contact and choose another site to swim."
