Micro-planning for resilience – a resilience module for Farm Environment Plans

Abstract

Planning to manage the effects of farming activities on the environment, especially water quality, has become a significant component of regional planning in New Zealand. In some regions, farmers are required to obtain resource consents to continue to farm. To obtain consent they are required to prepare farm environment plans (FEPs) that describe how they will meet targets for preventing nutrient and sediment loss to waterways. As part of the New Zealand Government –funded National Science Challenge – Resilience to Nature’s Challenges a new voluntary resilience module has been developed that focusses landowner attention on the effects of the environment on the landowner. This micro-planning approach is a shift from treating landowners as all powerful impactors on static environments to entities striving to thrive within impermanent, chaotically dynamic systems. In so doing it manifests a challenge to the present anthropocentric doctrine of the Anthropocene and re-embeds landowners, especially farmers, within their environment.