Despite the importance of the agricultural and downstream processing sectors in the New Zealand economy, there is no tradition of using partial or general equilibrium models to evaluate policies or other measures directed at the agricultural sector. Policy-makers have instead relied on the...

Lake Hume is a significant water storage located at the headwaters of the River Murray. It provides irrigation water, urban water supplies, flood mitigation and recreational benefits to a large and economically significant region. Water quality in Lake Hume has recently been the subject of...

To achieve water quality targets, management practice change in the sugar cane industry has been a large focus for natural resource management initiatives such as Reef Plan and Reef Rescue. Considerable public funds have been targeted at landholders to change on-ground management practices....

This paper explores how to enhance the role for academic research (natural sciences, economics and their integration; and stakeholder management) within the development and implementation of water quality policy in New Zealand. Our focus is on the use of market based instruments and particularly...

The salt burden in a stream reflects the blend of salty and fresh flows from different soil areas in its catchment. Depending not only on long-run rainfall, water yields from a soil are also determined by land cover: lowest if the area is forested and greatest if cleared. Water yields under...

Regulatory regimes intended to enforce changes to land use or management impose costs on landholders and governments. Landholder costs comprise changes to capital equipment, changes to crop or enterprise management including direct compliance costs, opportunity costs of lost production, and...

In the context of continuous droughts, the search for alternative water sources and increasing environmental restrictions on discharge of treated wastewater into natural water bodies, treated wastewater recycling offers a potential solution. In this paper the methods needed to assess the...