Continued progress across many rural and industrial consent-holders and the building of stronger relationships are features of this year’s Environment Southland’s compliance monitoring report.
The report gave an overview of Environment Southland’s compliance, monitoring and enforcement activities.
It was approved at a council meeting last week.
All industries within Southland require a range of resource consents to discharge to air, water, coast and land.
These discharges were monitored to ensure compliance with consents and minimise impacts on the environment.
Environment Southland chairman Nicol Horrell said the resource management team had been producing the report annually for more than two decades, and in that time, there had been a lot of change.
"What hasn’t changed is our commitment to ensuring strong environmental outcomes, and working with our community to educate and advise on how to minimise the impact activities might have on Southland’s environment," he said.
"It’s also a useful tool for individuals, businesses and councils to compare and assess their own performance or develop plans."
Results from the team’s industry inspections also showed positive gains, and many continued to make system improvements and working with the team when things did not quite go to plan, he said.
"These sorts of relationships are vital for ensuring we can achieve the improvements to our environment we all want."
During the 2023-24 year, the resource management team issued 40 infringement notices, compared to 33 the previous year.
There were 30 abatement notices issued during the year compared to 60 in 2022-23.
While there had been an upward tick in compliance among many consent-holders, some needed to continue to work hard to guard against non-compliance.
These consents often had a degree of complexity and reflected the specific, often unique processes, that occurred at each site, but the onus was on holders to meet the conditions of consents, Mr Horrell said.
The team expanded its education-first approach, implementing a new 24-hour notification system to give farmers notice of discharge inspections, leading to positive conversations.
Of the 783 dairy discharge consent inspections, 66% were fully compliant, 25% low risk non-compliance, 8% moderate non-compliance and 1% significant non-compliance. While there were fewer inspections this year, significant non-compliance was at its lowest level, down from 3% in the 2022-23 year, he said. — APL
