HB Conference to Focus on Land, Water, Human Resilience

Hawke’s Bay will be hosting the annual national conference of the New Zealand Association of Resource Management in Taradale next week, from 11- 13 October - http://nzarm.org.nz/conference-2016-details/ .

The Association’s focus is on farm and land management of soil and water and the annual conference is hosted by a different region each year.

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is hosting this year’s conference at the Mission, with the theme of building resilience. Resilience is the ability to maintain essential functions and bounce back after a disturbance, such as hill country after a storm or drought. Resilience is an increasingly important factor for farms as well as organisations. 

As well as a number of local and national speakers, two Australian guest speakers have been invited to specifically look at the concept of resilience and its application for land and water management.

• David Salt has co-authored two books on resilience and will talk about why resilience thinking has been taken up in the natural resource management field. 
• Paul Ryan will talk about resilience from the broader Australian experience where regions and organisations are using it in their resource management planning, and explain some of their approaches.

Two field trips will get conference attendees up close to some of Hawke’s Bay’s resource management and resilience challenges. On Wednesday the field trip will start at Tūtira looking at catchment protection, then travel to the Karamū Stream to look at the enhancement (and challenges) of the multiple values of the Karamū Stream, including the unique approach taken in developing a HBRC and hapū joint management plan for the historic Pākōwhai area. The field trip then visits Landwise’s microfarm on Ruahapia Road to look at sustainable cropping options.  

The second field trip on Thursday will travel into the Tukituki catchment to look at implementation of the Tukituki Plan which aims to reduce nutrients into water, and see Kintail Honey’s dry stock farm where a ‘trees for bees’ planting aims to provide a sustainable, year-round food stock for hives.

Ruud Kleinpaste, ambassador for Hawke’s Bay’s large Cape to City project, will be the guest speaker at the conference dinner.

Attending the conference will be land management, biodiversity and policy staff from primary production groups, regional and unitary councils, central government (Ministry for the Environment and Ministry for Primary Industries), and resource management consultants. 

6 October 2016

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