A report to today’s environmental implementation committee said a method for prioritising the "many degraded water bodies in Otago" was required for the council to target its effort.
Report authors environmental implementation manager Libby Caldwell and principal adviser Anna Molloy said staff proposed to determine criteria that could be used to score degraded water bodies and then rank them as "high, medium and low".
If adopted by the committee, the criteria used for ranking would be discussed with mana whenua and applied to produce a draft list of ranked water bodies "for further development of actions", the report said.
Staff were recommending four environmental criteria and four socioeconomic criteria to be used.
Work in headwaters or entire sub-catchments would be preferred, as would projects addressing water quality in "highly ranked riparian ecosystems".
Habitat for threatened species that could be protected or improved through the work would have a higher priority.
Additionally, work under way to identify "outstanding water bodies" would also be relevant if the results of that work became available.
Mana whenua significance, community interest, cost-sharing opportunities and the scale or severity of the degradation were also proposed to factor in the rankings, the report said.
