Partnerships Generate Co-Benefits in Agricultural Stream Restoration (Canterbury, New Zealand)

Abstract

In Aotearoa New Zealand, agricultural land-use intensification and decline in freshwater ecosystem integrity pose complex challenges for science and society. Despite riparian management programmes across the country, there is frustration over a lack in widespread uptake, upfront financial costs, possible loss in income, obstructive legislation and delays in ecological recovery. Thus, social, economic and institutional barriers exist when implementing and assessing agricultural freshwater restoration. Partnerships are essential to overcome such barriers by identifying and promoting co-benefits that result in amplifying individual efforts among stakeholder groups into coordinated, large-scale change. Here, we describe how initial progress by a sole farming family at the Silverstream in the Canterbury region, South Island, New Zealand, was used as a catalyst for change by the Canterbury Waterway Rehabilitation Experiment, a university-led restoration research project. Partners included farmers, researchers, government, industry, treaty partners (Indigenous rights-holders) and practitioners. Local capacity and capability was strengthened with practitioner groups, schools and the wider community. With partnerships in place, co-benefits included lowered costs involved with large-scale actions (e.g., earth moving), reduced pressure on individual farmers to undertake large-scale change (e.g., increased participation and engagement), while also legitimising the social contracts for farmers, scientists, government and industry to engage in farming and freshwater management. We describe contributions and benefits generated from the project and describe iterative actions that together built trust, leveraged and aligned opportunities. These actions were scaled from a single farm to multiple catchments nationally.

The sustainable agriculture imperative: A perspective on the need for an agrosystem approach to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030

“…Implementing some or all of these practices calls for a coordinated approach to implementing multiple solutions across scales (Goeller et al, 2020), which can be achieved through cross-sector partnerships to achieve co-benefits for all (Febria et al, 2020). Several models were recently tested to evaluate predicted changes in landscape biodiversity resulting from the incorporation of many of the above practices, which demonstrated that policies and practices aimed at habitat conversion-enlarging the extent of land under various forms of conservation management, restoring degraded land, and increasing the incorporation of landscape-level conservation planning-could reverse decades-long declines in biodiversity by around the mid-21st century (Leclère et al, 2020).…”