Water Quality – Risks and Adverse Effects Review

Details

“The Otago Regional Council is starting a review of its management of discharges of stormwater, wastewater, industrial and trade waste, and other hazardous substances (not addressed in ORC Plan Change 6A), to freshwater and to coastal water. This review will inform future changes to the Regional Plans: Water and Coast, as well as the implementation of non-regulatory methods to achieve good water quality and ecological health in rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers, estuaries and the coastal marine area.

Council seeks to ground this review on robust, defendable and up-to-date scientific knowledge on the risks and adverse effects from the discharges; taking into account the sensitivity of the different receiving environments across Otago and the values the receiving environments support. As a first step, Council seeks a review of the literature on these discharges and their adverse effects on water quality. This literature review will be mostly used by Council to:
 Identify the key contaminants / indicators Council and stakeholders should target
 Identify the issues that Council and stakeholders should focus on, when managing the discharges in scope
 Identify the ‘risk’ posed to specific receiving environments based on their sensitivity to the activity and associated contaminant of concern
 Assess the effectiveness and appropriateness of the current approach to discharge management”