But one thing was made clear by government, local body and community representatives attending the Mackenzie Country Symposium in Twizel last weekend - the solutions have to be driven by local people.
How that will be done has yet to be determined, and whether local people will be left to their own devices and how much influence "outsiders" will have is also not known.
That there are issues is very clear and not only in terms of future farming methods but in all development, from urban and rural subdivision through to tourism.
One example other than farming is the call to have the region's night sky given world heritage status. The growth of towns - particularly Twizel and Tekapo - has the potential to affect this, without controls.
Tourism development in any form - attracting more visitors to the area - also impacts on the environment. One of those is rubbish and effluent from visitors in campervans.
But the sector making the biggest impact, visually and environmentally, is still farming. Nowhere is that more graphically illustrated than with the Benmore irrigation scheme between the Ahuriri River and Lake Ruataniwha, where centre-pivots and other spray irrigation systems have transformed the former semi-barren, hieracium- and rabbit-infested tussockland into green pastures and crops.
The potential for irrigation in the region led to a proposal from three development companies for 16 intensive dairy farms housing 17,850 cows in cubicles in the Ohau and Omarama areas.
The symposium, attended by more than 200 people - of whom about half were local people including farmers, - was broken into four sessions, bringing in specialists to outline the issues as they saw them.
Some of those issues, as seen by the specialists, are. -
Resources:
The area has four well-defined distinctive landforms, including moraines, terraces and floodplains, fans and wetlands with extremes of cold, drought and wind and shallow, stony, porous, infertile soils subject to wind and water erosion.
Flora and fauna have slow growth rates, are tough, long-lived and are slow to recover.
The area contains threatened species of flora and fauna.
Since 1990, land use development, including irrigation, has intensified and more is planned, diminishing opportunities for protection.
The foremost remaining opportunity for protection is the northwest area of the Mackenzie Basin.
One problem is how to draw together co-operatively the many diverse needs and expectations in the region.
Other issues include afforestation, land ownership, subdivision, land use intensification and sub-urbanisation.
The region needs resilient communities and the challenge is to link passionate views with the legitimate desire to live and work in the area.
Increased development places pressure on water quality.
User values:
The economic viability of high country farming is under threat, with returns on investment low and irrigation the major opportunity to improve productivity, particularly after the loss of land through tenure review.
There is real pressure to change the economic viability of farms, with 36% considered not viable in a 2007 survey.
Farmers are a "fiercely strong, independent group" who will not readily accept people coming into the region and telling them what to do. Many farmers had worked in the area for generations and considered themselves environmentalists.
Tourism was a major contributor to the economy of the region and the region had about 60% of New Zealand's hydro storage for electricity, generating about 20% of the nation's demand.
Conservation contributed to the economic activity of the region, not only through the creation of national and conservation parks but also through biodiversity control, including wilding tree removal.
Governance:
The Waitaki and Mackenzie district councils govern at a local level, while Environment Canterbury (ECan) administers at a regional level, with an over-arching input at a Government level.
Those authorities maintain any process in terms of providing a plan or direction within the region must be driven by local people and communities, with input from outside.
A collaborative approach is needed to avoid continued litigation. Extremist views would be ignored.
Former decisions, including tenure review and those under the Resource Management Act, cannot be revisited without compelling reasons.
Property rights need to be observed.
Of 77 Crown leasehold properties in the region, 35 are in tenure review and 21 have completed that process.
As a result, 70,000ha has become conservation land and 73,000ha has been freeholded to farmers.
The Mackenzie and Waitaki district councils have adopted different approaches in terms of the landscape and permitted or controlled activities resulting in consistencies when the region needed to be looked at as a whole.