Waikato River Receives C+

Publish Date
Tuesday, 29 March 2016, 12:20PM
The Waikato river has been given a C+, designating it as an unhealthy river.

The Waikato river has been given a C+, designating it as an unhealthy river.

Just days after New Zealand's longest river failed a major health check, a grassroots freshwater campaign backed by the Tourism Export Council is set to present Parliament with a 12,000-strong petition demanding action.

The student-led Choose Clean Water group spent the summer touring the country's waterways and talking to communities who had watched their rivers and lakes become polluted and unswimmable.

Their campaign ultimately calls for the Government to set its recently-introduced "bottom line" standards higher, to ensure future generations will be able to one day swim at their favourite spots again.

Co-incidentally, the event happens to come just a week after the first comprehensive assessments of the Waikato and Waipa rivers, carried out by NIWA scientists, found the overall standard of the river catchment was unhealthy, scoring a mark of just C+.

Read more - NZ Herald

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