More Investment in Water Quality Monitoring is Needed

Aotearoa will not know if our water quality is improving for another 20 years unless we make a large investment in our water quality monitoring systems, finds a paper published this week.

Last week, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton pointed out the risks caused by a lack of stable funding for monitoring freshwater quality in New Zealand’s rivers, in a public letter to Judith Collins, Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Such funding needs to increase five-fold to enable more frequent monitoring, or refocus on monitoring fewer sites more frequently, suggests the journal paper, published by the Nature Publishing Group in Scientific Reports.