 E hui nei roto ito, ito tātou whare. Ngā mihinui ki te atua. Manaki nei io tātou i tēnei inga mana, inga reo, inga ka rangaranga maha. Ngā rangatira ku hui mai nei, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutua o ku rangatira Gillian Rawa Mark Keaura. Tēnā koutua o ku rangatira Gillian Rawa Mark Keaura. Ngā rairoa gūra tūri a dali kau rion wakata gōu resette. Go kanu uchai koutou. Ngā koutua samari foilke i mauri kini reappriwa mόTe tu moau heatedau m ŏhikau13 ngā monheara tēnau tēnau honan rai Ngā niara môte i vaunga tēu galihata gua karwou ys-mauri  Macronāu 25 a Monarchy, Kent Street, Edward Street, Duke Street, Queen Street and this house here is my grandparents' house in George Street and three months ago my husband and I, we returned to the river and we bought my grandparents' house and we had to turno, turno means you have to put a bid in against other family members and I was the winner and I now am the proud owner of this little house in George Street at Turangawaewae Marae. So our house in Kent Street was across the fence from this house in George Street and so going back to Turangawaewae, we're there in the weekends, most weekends and the sounds of the Marae and Turangawaewae are quite different to the sounds of Auckland. I'm very aware now of sounds that I grew up with as a child, the sounds of trains not aeroplanes, the sounds of rugby league and also the sounds of the river which passes by because our house is right across the road from the river and also the other thing that I've really become aware of again is the fog, the fog in the damp which you don't experience here in Auckland. So I'm here to talk to you today about Te Manau o Te Wai and many of you will be wondering what is Te Manau o Te Wai? Now Te Manau o Te Wai is an objective inside the national policy statement for fresh water and when I read this objective I thought what does it really mean because it's really ambiguous but they've plonked it right in there and it's meant to give meaning for how we think about water and what we do with water. Now the problem is if you don't actually come from a river community or you don't actually have experience of living around water and rivers or lakes or wetlands, it's really hard to actually understand what all of this relationship with water and river is all about. All I think anyway. So what I'm going to try to do today is to explain Te Manau o Te Wai in the context of me returning to Ngarawahia and living at Turangawaewae and looking at the way in which the people where I come from value the Waikato River on our little patch. Remember there are many, many Māori groups that live along this river and we all have different ways of thinking about it but what I want to try and do today is talk to you or bring to life the concept of Te Manau o Te Wai through my personal experience. Now Te Manau o Te Wai is an objective in the national policy statement for fresh water. Each community will decide what Te Manau o Te Wai means to them based on their unique relationship with fresh water and in Māori fresh water is known as Waimāori and in their area Orohe. The national policy statement for fresh water defines Te Manau o Te Wai as the integrated and holistic well-being of fresh water. It is up to communities and councils to decide and to recognise what Te Manau o Te Wai means to them in their regions. So I guess what I'm going to ask you today is does this objective that is in this national policy statement for fresh water, does it actually have any teeth? I don't know if it does actually in all honesty. I'm trying to find its teeth but I can't really find them but what I found out about Te Manau o Te Wai as an objective is that it is open to very broad interpretation so it means that community groups and councils can actually interpret that objective in any way they want to in ways that give them value. And it is also not an objective just for Māori, it is a universal objective which is kind of odd because it's written in Māori and I guess we're trying to marify everybody in New Zealand or make people bicultural but the fact that it is a Māori term putting forth a universal concept may be a difficult for some people to understand and people may think that it's just for Māori people. So let's unpick Te Manau o Te Wai for Māori in the region where I've bought my grandparents' house what things are important and valuable to Waikato Māori. Now that word Waikato is an interesting word in itself because for many of you who know Waikato, Waikato River 426 kilometres long, the longest river in New Zealand but at one end of the Waikato River you have the Ngāti Tūwharetoa people and at the other end of the river you have Waikato people at Te Puaha or Waikato or Port Waikato. Now at both ends of that river although the name is the same both groups of people have different definitions of what Waikato means. So Pei Te Hurunui Jones who is a very well known Tainui scholar back in 1959 defined Waikato for the Ngāti Tūwharetoa end around Ngāti Tūpō as being captive waters. More recently around the time of the Treaty settlement claims Sir Robert Mahuta who was from Ngāti Mahuta and from the area that I'm from defined the word Waikato to mean full flowing river. So can you see that at both ends you already have this contestation around naming and what water and what water can mean. Same name different interpretations. So where I come from at Turanga kawai marae, we have these beautiful gates which on the front of them have taniwhā. Now taniwhā are water demons they can be kaitiaki, they can also be shape shifters and they can also be creatures that tell you what's going to happen in the future. And these beautiful gates here were actually carved by members of my whānau who actually originated in Ngāti Whātua at Ōrākei. So they went to Puia set up Turanga Waiwai marae back in the 1920s they went back with her and they took residents at Turanga Waiwai marae and they became the carvers there and so the Marus where I am from there, we are responsible for these gates here that are out the front of Turanga Waiwai. So back in the 70s when we were just preparing our Treaty settlement it was very important to get all the cultural features right, to show the rest of the world that we were a water people that cared about rivers, that our identity was intertwined with rivers and that we should actually have rights in the region and at that time that was the only thing we could do to get recognition from the Crown because all our land had been confiscated and the only way that we could make a claim to the region was through our identity with the river we were called Waikato iwi and of course the river was there and at that time the Crown was saying or the Government was saying that nobody could own water and therefore that was the way in which we legitimated our claim to the territory. So things like this carvings of Taniwha are really important to us so that's part of our value system. Another part of our legitimating ourselves was to build a lot of wakatoa, the war canoes are called rangatahi, it's captained by one of my friends his name is Karihana Wirihana, he's what we call the kaitakitaki and it's really important to know that these types of activities embody a whole lot of Māori knowledge, you know this knowledge here around wakatoa, turning fleets of canoe on a river takes a lot of specialisation and that knowledge belongs to men. So while I'm a social scientist, environmental anthropologist and I care about people, there are certain areas of knowledge that I know that I just cannot go into because of my gender, because of my age and it's for them, it's for them to pass on to other young men, not for me to pass on to people through books. So with knowledge comes responsibility, that's what I'm trying to say and these are knowledges that are particular to rivers. So this is another canoe that we built at our marae, this is called tāheretikitiki and tāheretikitiki is the canoe that houses it takes all the men from all over Tainui. Rangatahi which you saw is the canoe for, oh no sorry, I get it wrong, rangatahi is the canoe that takes men from all over Tainui, this canoe tāheretikitiki takes men from all over, from the four winds if you want to be a paddler you can go and be on this canoe here, but we have our very own canoe called Tumanako Hope which is just reserved for Ngāti Mahuta which is Turanga Waiwai and Wahi Marae people only. So we have three main canoes and all of those canoes embody a special type of mātauranga, knowledge. Now what's also really important to us at our marae is the fact that in the future, future generations, we want them to be able to go to the river and to do the things that we did, you know, swim, catch eels have that connection, we want them to be able to have access. So these are some of the values that are really important to Māori from Turanga Waiwai and these are things that we will take into consideration when we are trying to sort out our version of Te Mana or Te Wai in the National Policy statement. So who are these guys? When I did my PhD I decided I wanted to do a PhD on rivers and the only way to get into it at that senior level is to have kōmātua supporting you and I was very lucky that my dad and his friends thought that maybe I could do a PhD and I asked our ātiki at the time was the Māori Queen, can I do this PhD and they thought it was a bit odd because I was a female and they thought it would be a better topic for a male but anyway then they backed down and she sort of said all, she didn't say actually she didn't say yes but she didn't say no so I just did it and anyway so what I did was these guys took me for a hikoi in a car, not a walk, up the length of the Waikato River and when I got to the very end this man here, John Ham, is a rangatira from Turangi and they took me to the Turangi Information Centre and then they laid out all the Mātauranga for the different river system which was the Whanga ihu, the Waikato and all the tributaries and that's how they passed on that knowledge of rivers to me and also the relationships from the different iwi and hapū groups in the area were all delivered to me through that model so that's important so what I want to get across today are some very simple things Māori are not homogenous in their understandings of rivers and the way that they talk about local rivers for example where I'm from in the Waikato at Turangawaewae we talk about the river being a Tupuna an ancestor however 200km south they don't talk about the river as being a Tupuna so the people from Ngāti Raukawa who are down in the Tokorua Putaruru area they don't call it a Tupuna, they have their own way of defining rivers so what I'm trying to say is that there are some Māori concepts that are just unique to some Māori groups just like this new term Tupua well it's new for me but Whanganui people use the term Tupua to talk about their Tupua Aua the Whanganui River but we don't have that term we talk about Tupuna Aua so basic ways of talking about river we've got the word Aua which is river Taonga which a lot of Māori use and that can mean river, natural resource natural water body Tupuna so it's Tupuna if you're from the west coast if you're from the east coast it's Tupuna and Tupua a supernatural being but all of those different terms all mean river as well as those words to define a river there are also some really important Māori fundamental concepts which create knowledge systems which create knowledge for rivers and you'll hear a lot about people talking about Māori the life force of rivers or the Tāpū in the North you know the Wahi Tāpū the sacred places of rivers or even Tanifā who are the water demons the shape shifters the creatures that can tell you what's going to happen in the future in rivers and then there's Rāhui which is a really important term for where I'm from where you can prohibit people from doing things it's kind of like a sort of resource management and then there's Mana the authority to be in a part of the river and I have friends here from Ngāi Tahu they have words like Mahingakai which is gathering food gathering from the river so what I'm trying to say is that different iwi and hapū and marae and whānau have their own fundamental concepts which hold their local knowledges about rivers and what I really want to get across today is that we shouldn't homogenise this stuff that we should realise the specificity that each group has so if we understand that then we will be able to unpick and understand this concept of Te Mana o te Wai a lot better of course the Crown has a lot to do with the way Māori talk about rivers now and they in partnership with Māori creating new terms for example most recently in my tribe we have the river flipping from being called Tupuna Awa to Awa Tupuna which means ancestral river and so when they created the new deed of settlement and the settlement between the Crown and our tribe about the river they renamed the river Te Awa Tupuna and that meant that this ancestral river could be recognised as being a river for all Māori and all other New Zealanders but also it attached a clean up fund to the river. The other big river name changed lately is the Whanganui River and that is now known as Te Awa Tupua and this river is really important because it has the identity with similar legal rights to a person. It also has a clean up fund attached to it the Waikato River is not recognised as a legal person now when you're thinking about oh my gosh it's a legal person how can that be well we have trusts and we have commercial entities that are also thought of as legal persons so it shouldn't be so hard for you to get your head around but I'm going to say this the recognition of a river as a person produces a profound cultural shift in the way we think about and interact with rivers so I mean pushing you forward and I'm going to push you a little bit to think about it that way but you don't have to think about it that way for the Waikato River because we don't we think of it as an ancestor. Okay so I'm going to end one of the classic texts in anthropology is by a woman called Mary Douglas and Mary Douglas is really hard to read this book because when you go through it she talks about he this and he that and there's never any reference to woman I think it was that period in the 60s when women were not included in the text even though she was a professor and a female so a thing that I like about Mary Douglas' work is that it gives me another way to think about pollution and I think when we talk about rivers in New Zealand you can't not think about pollution but this book Purity and Danger is an analysis of the concepts of pollution and tabu. Now a broad approach to pollution it gives a broad approach to pollution drawing on arguments of danger, separation and classification. Sacred things are to be protected from defilement for example rivers and dirt is considered to be matter out of place so dirt can be anything that doesn't belong something that causes disorder and it's an interesting way to think about stuff and she really wrote the book to talk about religion you know the way that Jewish people would eat some things from the sea but not other things and it's all about polluting this way that we view pollution and what dirt is and what dirt isn't and some people think about rivers in New Zealand they don't think they're actually doing anything bad in them but other people think they are. Now for example if we were to look at these next three slides coming up we have power stations along the Waikato River and the Waikato River is there where the trees are and this power station actually does pollute because it actually puts arsenic straight into the river and the power station is what we would classify as matter out of place it shouldn't be there it's not part of the landscape and for many other New Zealanders these sorts of developments are also considered to be matter out of place however having said that these power stations are actually on Māori land and actually shareholders in these power stations are Māori so it all depends on the way in which you want to look at things out of place again related to electricity and dams being put there in the middle of the river a lot of Māori wouldn't like them there but some do and I mean I had to experience a power cup on Saturday one whole day without power it was really difficult I don't know how we would cope without power stations without power anymore and another one this one's right on the back of where I'm from more matter out of place this is Genesis's power station and it uses the Waikato River to cool down the water and the problem with this is that it heats up the water as it goes out and it changes the ecosystem so all of these things are matter out of place and can be considered you know they can just be considered harmful so the whole order and well-being of rivers is important to all New Zealanders and while ensuring that river waters are drinkable and swimmable for future generations we must not lose sight of water ownership and water allocation issues because at the moment what I think is that we're talking a lot about pollution and I mean I care about pollution and the thing is these debates are generally carried out in public and the government allows us to participate in these debates against Fonterra, against whoever the polluters are and the real issue that we cannot lose sight of is the water ownership and water allocation agreements that are being done and these are done mostly in private so I suggest these topics are pertinent to the well-being and whole order of rivers in 2030 and that we shouldn't take our eye off the ball and this is the way things can be interpreted and anyway I'll leave you on a nice slide and thank you to all of you. Hopefully it'll come up. I've chosen to call my part of this talk rivers in space and time. I am as Mark said the scientist of the pair although perhaps that's unfair to Marama and when we talked about how we would share this session I immediately said let me talk about the pollution and the river stuff please you can talk about all the things you know about in detail but please don't make me talk about anything too complicated. I grew up on a river as well and perhaps that's why we fit together quite well in this session I grew up on the Matau River in Southland and while I was growing up the time between when I was first a rear of the river at the bottom of our road, at the bottom of our farm and when I went to university it was a time of a dramatic change. It was a time of application of huge amounts of fertilizer, of true beautification within our river systems. It was probably the time when there was no wastewater treatment there was very little control on industry. It was the time during the 60s and 70s, early 70s when our water quality the quality of our rivers was at its worst. Much has changed since then. I'd like to talk a little bit about that today. What's a river? We've heard about it what a river is from Marama. If we want to define it it's a natural stream of fresh water of fairly large size flowing through a definite course or channel and every river is a part of the land which is its largest system and the activities in its largest system. That's its catchment and the Waikato you've already seen from Marama. All of these things that are happening here contribute to that river and the nature of that river. The catchment reflects the land the geology, the erosion, the steepness or otherwise. It reflects the activities in that land, the nature of the businesses that go on, the pastoral farming the livestock that are kept there and their interactions with the river. It reflects the weather and the extremes of climate and it impacts on us directly in those ways and when we interact directly with that river we experience all of those interactions. Now a river is a product of a water cycle. Water is stored in oceans and in the atmosphere when it condenses, it falls as rain or snow it moves into groundwater systems or surface water systems and ultimately collects in the bottom of its catchment and flows downhill towards the sea and that flow downhill is our river. Now we stick a lot of stuff in these catchments and those as I said modify the way in which that river will develop the nature of the water in that river. We extract water from groundwater for irrigation that changes the water supply to that river We dam those rivers for energy supply for water supply for irrigation. We carry out our agriculture, we introduce animals onto those land around those rivers and they contribute to the change in nutrient supplies and so forth. And then there's all our urban activities of water supply, water extraction, wastewater collection, discharge of waste and treatment. And of course stormwater. God don't forget that. Some of these are point sources of contamination, the dirt that you beautifully described to you. Some of them are diffuse and harder to get a handle on, harder to understand what that contribution is and where it's coming from. Now, so what's the state of our rivers now? Ministry for the Environment and Stats New Zealand have very conveniently given us this extremely easy to use and see example of how our rivers are now. This was the result of some work done by a number of groups and a large report that went to MFE that I'll talk about a little more. First of all, consented water takes 51% of the consented water is taken for irrigation. Water applied to land to enhance the growth of our crops mostly grass, for cows. Some for drinking, some for industry and some for whatever those other purposes are which we might have. What do we know? Our industries are leading to an increase in nutrient supply and increase in nitrogen leaching through the soil into water. 29% increase over the last 15 or so years. In terms of river sites monitored and this is about 234 sites that are monitored here, nitrogen is getting worse, nitrogen level is getting worse than 55% of them and less than half of that are we seeing an improvement. Phosphorus on the other hand, getting a bit better. More improvement than worsening, but worsening is still happening. And what about our urban rivers? I was talking to an urban river scientist or stream scientist yesterday and I asked her what she thought was happening with our urban rivers. She said well they're stuffed and I hear that a lot not much hope for some of our urban rivers. That's an indicator of the health risk you expose yourself to if you contact that 22 times higher than a natural river in an uncontaminated environment or a forest environment. Nitrogen much higher, phosphorus as well. Not a good picture. This data came from a paper by Scott Larnard or a report by Scott Larnard and his team at Niwa who sent that through to the ministry for the Environment. And what they did was put together some models based on water quality data and land use so that they could predict across the country. Nutrients in this case total nitrogen. How to interpret this figure? Darker colours are higher levels of nitrogen, lighter colours are lower levels. You can see that those less impacted areas of New Zealand that we would recognise as less impacted have lower nitrogen levels. Everywhere where we have a lot of fertilised agriculture we see high levels of nitrogen with the black colouring. What about health risk as measured by E. Coli? Pretty similar picture here, not quite as intense but not a whole lot of difference. And what about ecological values? This is based on an MCI index again lighter colours are better, darker colours are worse MCI index measures the insect communities and the invertebrate communities in a stream and really uses those as a measure of how healthy that ecosystem is. Again, in those well-developed areas of New Zealand the picture is pretty bleak. And of course I worry a lot about swimming water quality and because you are all Aucklanders probably or living here for the moment you worry about water quality and swimming as well, don't you? A lot of rivers in the area. Our lakes are pretty good but the picture around our rivers poor at best, fair. Land covers being changing. So in this time frame here that come from the lower database, 1996 through 2012 we're seeing a bit of change, more urbanisation, a lot more exotic forestry, less native forests, less native scrub lands. A bit less exotic grassland, that's transferred to forestry. So changes occurring in this case a little more slowly but we're in a situation where we have a problem with our water quality in our rivers, we have a problem with the ecosystems in our rivers and we know about that. We've described that really well and in fact we've known about it since I was a child. We've known about that for my entire career and that's why I'm a fresh water scientist. So let's look forward, where's this going to go? Is it going to get any better? Well it'll become pretty apparent that the thing we've got driving our problems here is people. It's us. The things that we expect like power, I had power up for a whole week, man that's hard. Am I going for solar panels? You bet! And our population's increasing. Now mostly probably in urban areas, probably in the North Island, probably in those places where we know our water quality is worse. That tells us that by 2030 the population will be more like 5.5 million. A few more people we've got to fit into this area and a bit more business to manage. A lot more people to support and we're still just as far away as the rest of the world as we were before. What about the prospect for those primary industries which cover so much of the surface of our land? Well MPI looked ahead and did some projections through 2020 or so and what do they think? Animal numbers and production of meat and dairy and wool likely to stay relatively stable. Can't see a lot of change going on they said in these areas. What else? Increasing horticulture and aquaculture and that might be aquaculture on land and tanks which will require water supply and recirculation of water and good quality water. Horticulture is going to require more irrigation. What about fertiliser? Surely that's getting more expensive. Back when I was a child in the 1970s the Government took subsidies off fertiliser, made a massive difference to our water quality. That eutrification I observed dropped away because suddenly it was too expensive to put fertiliser on all over the place. Is that likely to happen again? Well no, probably not in this time frame. Fertiliser production is increasing usage is increasing, the price is likely not to be a big driver in terms of this usage. Forestry production has increased rapidly over the last few years and in 2015 we've seen a massive increase in forestry production. The number of logs that have been sold and milled. Part of that is because the price has been better. The few trees around my place that might not be here much longer but I'll be able to plant new ones. What else? That's the forestry production. They also predict that farmers will become more nimble and cost-effective. Good. And in fact what does that mean? We're going to see them skipping around their paddocks in a nimble manner. That'll be very good. And they're going to be holding onto their checkbooks like you wouldn't believe. Actually what it does mean is that there's now a whole bunch of farming systems available and supported by the companies who are interested in these kinds of things like Fonterra, like Darien Z, the Balanced Fertiliser, where they're really interested in designing systems, whole farm systems, which integrate weather information with soil information, with farming practice and with the need to rotate stock or grow grass or whatever they need to be able to improve both waste disposal, water use and fertiliser applications. So there's some pretty sophisticated tools being developed which will really make a difference to some of these things. That's what they mean by more nimble. So that's, I think, a good sign. What else is going to change? Well, what about climate? Big systems that we can't influence in the way that we can the output of a farm or the quality of a stream. And a poll in the Herald a few weeks ago said, oh well, we don't think that we'll be able to overcome this climate challenge because there's crazy guys with orange hair in other parts of the world who are big time deniers. Some of those trees at my place are because of this that have a problem at the moment. This storm. So we expect to see sea level rise, climate change, more storms, more droughts, more problems. All of these are going to affect our rivers. Let's have a look at some of those climate change models and what they're telling us within the timeframe. This is data from Niwa putting together an average of the climate change models and using some of their worse scenarios because it's those worse scenarios that seem to be panning out at the moment. 2025. This is difference from now. Darker green means a bit of change in temperature, lighter green means more change in temperature. So by 2030 we're going to be seeing an increase in temperature of one and a half to two degrees maybe in our mountainous regions. That affects things like snowpack and spring melts and that would supply. And it's going to be warming for all of us. If we look out to the end of the century then warming continues and we're getting into the two and a half to three and a little more degrees change. And what about rainfall? Similar kinds of scenarios Over the next period, what do we see? Increase rainfall by small amounts over much of the country and less rain in those rain shadow areas on the east coast. As we progress towards the end of the century, that just increases and the west coast gets wetter and wetter. It's going to be much more exciting in the waterfalls except you might not be able to see them for their constant rain. Now this is mean over annual means. If you think about seasonal change that's happening as well. And in fact we saw a very different year 2017-18 than we've seen before temperature wise and rainfall wise. And what are we seeing now in our rainfall or what are we likely to see with climate change in our rainfall? Spring will be drier in the north and in the east of the south island. I have no idea. It's going to get wetter in the summer and in the autumn in the far north. It's likely to be I was that, I was yours. It's alright Marama, perfectly fine. It's stopped now. Okay, where were we? Okay, wetter in the summer in the north, drier in the summer in parts of the south. Autumns will be drier in the lower north island and into the south island but still wetter in our part of the world. And on into winter where there'll be some drier areas in the east but on the whole it's looking pretty wet. So that's just in the next time frame. If we look through until the end of the century the situation is quite different. Much drier in the spring, summer, a bit wetter in the autumn in our part of the world and building up really wet down in south and the Mataua River is going to be powering down. What's the likely effect of all that on river flows? Here's some more Nihua data. Increased river flows on the west coast and in the mountains, the mountainous regions of the south island. All the rivers and streams on the east coast will be a lot drier. In the north island in our region we would expect our river flows to be a lot less and in some parts of Hawkes Bay perhaps those will dry up altogether. So some big changes ahead for our rivers in terms of the effects of climate. Now I've been painting a picture that looks a bit like this for a catchment pretty dying. And that's not what we want. That can't be where we're going. That was where we were going back in the 1960s and 70s. This is where we want to go. Where we are able to meet the needs of our communities and our cities and our businesses without impacting too badly on our rivers so that we can develop a balance between the needs of a river and the needs of the community. So where do we sit across this spectrum? Marama already mentioned the resource manager, the National Policy Statement for Fresh Water. And that's since having been drawn up about 2014. That sits within the Resource Management Act. Resource Management Act has been with us since 1991 when I was at university doing my PhD actually. We've had guidelines developed and promulgated from that since but it's not until more recently, very recently that the National Policy Statement's been developed. Along with that we have guidelines for ecological and cultural management and we have microbiological water guidelines and we've got a bunch of other guidelines that go with that. Now that's what's happening from Crown. They've seen this problem coming a long way out because we told them they can see it, they're not stupid and they've had to balance what we could do for our environment with what we can do for our businesses and our economics. The regional councils that we created along with that Resource Management Act were given a responsibility in environmental management. So they've been working on that since about 1991 as well and those regional councils were originally designed on catchments. So they were responsible for an area which covered the inputs to a group of rivers. So control was possible no longer where they divided on rivers as districts had used to be. So we were thinking more systems orientated more integratively. Now the National Policy Statement on Fresh Water has given those councils a lot of responsibility so they have to consider economic, environmental, social and cultural well-being with equal relevance in their considerations and they have to design strategies for meeting those expectations by 2025. So within the timeline of this rivers 2030 consideration. Now supporting all of this and underpinning it of course is research. Research done in the CRIs like Niwa and Landcare who were also formulated about the same time. Research done in universities like our own and we have extensive river research and of course done in private institutes like the Courser and Institute. Now this precipitated a little bit along the track responses from industry groups and business who started to say well actually we've got some responsibility in all this as well. Well perhaps their responses have been a bit dodgy on occasions and we've been quite fickle in how we might recognise them. Fonterra and Dairy and Z have both tried to develop environmental understanding and some environmental processes. Those supporting riparian planting and fencing of streams for example which is a really positive thing. So there is and has been a response to this for quite a long time. What's different now? What's different now? Good thing it's my last slide almost. What's different now is that we're starting to get this other part of the cycle sorted. So we're seeing changes in farming and business practice. That nimble response which enhances economics and environmental sustainability is starting to become visible. We've got research which is not only locked up in the research organisations and feeding government but it's sitting out here as public facing information. Things like that one page are from the Ministry for the Environment. There's a bunch of community empowerment occurring where you've probably heard of the snack pack which provides a whole lot of simple water testing kit to community groups. And there's citizen science where people become involved in projects and there's a lot of water projects involved with citizen science coordinated by scientists within institutions such as universities. And what has this done? This has led to individuals, to iwi, to communities becoming really engaged in how this change might occur. And this is incredibly positive because when you engage people individuals then change really happens. Everything is in place. When you get the people on board then things really move. And here's an example of how that happens. I had the advantage on the honour I suppose of being one of the judges of the New Zealand Rivers award last year. And the Supreme 2016 I guess. Perhaps that's not last year. The Supreme winner from that was this guy David Croft and his group, the Pahau River Enhancement Group. Now they're in South Canterbury. It's an irrigated farming area, pastoral farming and cropping. And they used to use a surface flow irrigation methodology, border diking. And it's not very efficient. It doesn't use water well and it carries a lot of nutrients from fertilizer into rivers. The Pahau River was getting really, really into a very poor state, highly enriched. And the Ecoli levels were extremely high. This group of farmers sat down and said, you know, we're going to be in big trouble. They're going to start stopping us farming if we don't do something about this. So they got together and started looking at what they could achieve. And the council, the regional council helped them with this. They set some nutrient rules. They trained these farmers or assisted them in taking a systems approach and thinking how this would work. And ultimately now we see that their river was the most improved in this year. And David's the coordinator of that group. And his wife told me when I was talking to her, he spends most of the time after dinner on the phone and he's getting on to them and he's saying, look, I saw your irrigators going when they shouldn't have been going. You're not following the system. And it's people like this. Their businesses are better and they feel really good about what they've achieved in that river because their grandchildren can swim in that now. So I'm pretty positive about where we're going with this. I think we've got all the pieces of the puzzle in place. It's just a matter of making sure they sit tidally. This is a community group out where I live and they've been working on water quality this summer and I've been helping them with that and as far as I can, but it's their project. Now most of these people are retired. Some of them are enthusiastically younger. By 2030 I'll be retired. I'll be well retired by then. I look forward to being a part of one of these groups and we'll be working on water quality and we'll be looking at the information that's available to us from the ministries and we'll be seeing a real improvement. It'll take a while to come through but I think we're on the way. Thank you. How many people want to ask a question? I see one hand up. Gary first. I just wonder what we can be doing to get the two worlds to work together that you describe. An example. We can't allow to combine a western science perspective and about any Maori perspective. They have to work separately and then we have to try to entweave them at the end of the process. Rather than thinking from a lens that puts them together at the outset and then we can see how that takes place. You want to take that one first? Take it for the team. I think the best way to start the sort of end result is for people like Gillian and I to talk to one another at the very early stages of a project and I work at the James Henare Research Centre and my colleagues are sitting right here and the thing about us is that we work with all of the faculties at this university and there's another colleague over there, Jason Ingham, and he's the head of civil engineering and he's got another colleague next to him, Tu Manako. What we do is we start working on projects from their genesis and so is that we get understanding amongst one another and of course now at the university we are burdened by what's known as Vision Ma Tauranga where all research projects, whether it be going through the Royal Society, MB, a National Science Challenge or one of the centres of research excellence needs to look at how projects are going to affect Māori New Zealanders and so it's in the best interests of researchers who are wanting, you know, the best interests of researchers to actually work with Māori colleagues and money, that's a real reason to work with us but also there have been studies in the past done by people like Dame Evelyn Stokes and Dame Joan Metch who have actually proven that working with Māori and Māori knowledge or Mā Tauranga is just as viable as scientific knowledge and together it actually enriches the experiences and enhances the overall learning but we've got to talk to one another and feel that we're coming in on an equal level you know, I know she's a professor so she is more and I would comment that I think that we're in the right place now where Te Mana OTI is not so different than what our communities are thinking I think there's a really huge similarity here, it's a matter of making sure that the language between the two works Jim? Exactly on this design topic because what's just been said every dollar of the $60 million in the Our Land and Water Science Challenge this year which closes between now October and the fine life by a new student must have vision of Mā Tauranga as an imperative in every study and the full kāhui of Māori working with it and the very issue that's just been raised down here has been rolled over three years in regard to water, in regard to capacity for land but water in a sustainable long-term sense and Māori are a vital part of it so I'm not going to say that because this funding is available to us all That's very positive, there's two questions on this side You mentioned briefly the crime of legal classenhood to the Elder River, I can't quite answer yet so I just wondered what you think the impacts of that have been and if it's something that can be transposed to other things like main one that we talked about today The settlement for the Waikato River actually happened in 2009 originally and at that time they were Waikato and other tribes along the Waikato River because there are many had their own aspirations about what they wanted for the river and the way they framed the river was always to talk about it down our end anyway as a tupuna, as an ancestor but Māori from the Whanganui River had a different idea about what they wanted for their river and I think a lot of that has to do with the amount of industry and dependence there is on the Waikato River for water in Auckland the aspirations of Māori on the Waikato River are quite different than the aspirations for Māori along the Whanganui River and given the ten year break between the two settlements of course there's going to be different motivations and aspirations but even now there is no talk about the Waikato River getting personhood it's not something that our tribes are aiming for they want water allocations and ownership of water rather than turning a river into a person so it just depends on what you want as an iwi I really just wanted to say what fantastic and inspiring talks they both were I feel I'll leave you with a real sense of possibility of being uplifted and working in that community space I just love that idea that we can bring these together and that the matter out of place is showing through both or from the different sort of perspectives that we're looking at so just thank you guys for that. I thought it was really interesting that some of it is about this question what is the river anyway and we have maybe some competing definitions and the question I wanted to ask is around this kind of the land where the river is about the water and it's just this kind of H2O as a substance and whether or not that kind of misses out and I think we saw this in the Aotearoa legislation that actually has a bit of a richer thing of what the river is all of the living beings that are connected with it as well as that whole ecosystem is the flood plain that apparently is sitting behind a stock bank and being drained that kind of shift in baseline where the river used to be this incredibly thriving ecosystem so I guess the question is do you think that we can be doing more work to weave that kind of understanding so that when we say river we're not just like I hear that word. When you say tupuna, the tupuna means everything so if I frame it using that Māori word tupuna awa that actually means the river banks, the sandy eels, even the people are exclusive of everything and that's why those fundamental Māori concepts and the way of seeing water bodies are really important to Māori so those distinctions don't separate river and even within Māori there are a number of words for water that classify all the different types of water, why Māori, why kino, why taitai, we really have got the classification of water on high ebb and that's because it's so important and I would suggest that the more that we begin to understand and to incorporate Māori thinking into the way we place out or build our legislation and build our policies and our guidelines the closer we become to actually wiping out those barriers now we recognise catchments now, we recognise their functional systems we recognise these systems rather than actual components and that's come a long way back from where we've been and I think we're coming a lot closer We don't have a lot of lakes and that helps, we also use our lakes for supply so they're protected, we operate on a protected catchment concept where we protect those catchments, we retain those lakes within forest areas specifically to protect water quality so that's part of why some of our lakes are good others of our lakes are quite volcanic and they're fed by groundwater not by surface water and that water is generally of a lot higher quality than is the surface water that's contaminated by stormwater predominantly and it's stormwater that's the real problem here because the effect is of build-up of heavy metals of toxicants of various sorts and it's quite hard to get rid of those things I think it's started in a lot of places, it's hard to say to a community group actually you need to care about this person's water over here in the same way that Marama described the difference between different groups with the Maori so individual groups can look after their piece of water, their region and there's more and more and more groups and the integration between those or the connection between those seems like it will probably get better but this is a patchwork and I think it will always be a patchwork because people do care about their own patch and they care a good deal about their own patch Thank you very much for your time.