An environmental report on the Horizons region has given a thumbs-up to some improvements but has also found areas that need more work.
During the last seven years the council has moved from asking questions about environmental problems to having programmes to address them, said Horizons Regional Council science manager Jon Roygard.
The council's last State of the Environment report came out in 2005, soon after the devastating February 2004 floods. Hill-country erosion was on everyone's mind, as the floods washed an estimated 200 million tonnes of soil off the land, 30 million tonnes ending up in rivers and streams.
Since then the council's Sustainable Land Use Initiative (SLUI) has produced management plans for 419 farms in erosion-prone areas. Those have resulted in stabilising work on 10,000ha of highly erosion-prone land. Erosion resilience there was at 9.5 per cent and will double due to the work done. A further 50,000ha still needs improvement if the SLUI is to achieve its full erosion reduction target.
Meanwhile, sediment levels in about half the rivers that Horizons monitors are slightly better.