Climate change will raise South Canty drought risk

South Canterbury is prone to drought.

According to the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), New Zealand and South Canterbury have a 50:50 chance of enduring a major El Nino this spring.

This genuine cause for concern boils to the surface every seven to 10 years. Cast your mind back to the last event, in 2007/8, and any examination of far records will reveal it was not a stellar year for the economy or on-farm production. Indeed this last big El Nino knocked almost $3 billion out of the economy and was the event that tipped New Zealand into recession well before the global financial crisis.

What we know in El Nino years is that South Canterbury is highly prone to drought. Of course our province happens to have an ace up its sleeve for those within its reach and it is called the Opuha Dam.

What we can take from this warning from Niwa is the time it gives us to prepare feed and stock management plans. Of course, we all hope it is wrong yet when it comes to El Nino we also know it is never an if, but a when.

When you put this periodic chance of an El Nino with a climate change model suggesting rain could decrease by 20 per cent for the east coast area, from south Canterbury up to the East Cape, then some serious investment decisions are needed. These decisions are needed to research crops and pastures which require less water and fewer nutrients. There are also important infrastructure decisions needed for our towns and farm system alike.

It makes the Labour Party's recent anti-irrigation stance a perplexing reversal from when Jim Anderton was Agriculture Minister. Winding up the Crown Irrigation Company flies in the face of both regional economic development and regional climate adaption. It is also at odds with Labour's desire to enact the world's most repressive Emissions Trading Scheme.

While water is vital to farming, without stored water to maintain flow levels, some of our rivers will increasingly run lower and warmer. Lower and warmer rivers do not auger at all well for biodiversity. What it means is that farming and the environment are equally impacted unless we do something beyond shuffling paper.

That something is South Canterbury's Opuha Dam.

Opuha is an unqualified environmental success even acknowledged by Fish and Game. It is also an unqualified success for farming, recreation and aquatic life. It is why we need more Opuha Dams and why the Labour Party needs to revisit this abandonment of regional climate change adaption and the economic double jeopardy posed by its version of the ETS.

Our view is that a blind adherence to headline reduction targets for New Zealand agriculture is not doable and is not being a good global citizen. Penalising our farmers for being world's best output will only reduce production and that production will be picked up offshore by less productive farmers.

Where's the good in that for South Canterbury?