Richard McDowell feels honoured and humbled to receive the Hutton Medal, but is quick to acknowledge the contribution from colleagues who have provided support and advice throughout his career.
Informing policymakers can be challenging, but Professor Richard McDowell has a special interest in presenting understandable science and has been recognised for his outstanding contribution to environmental policy. He talked with Annette Scott.
Richard McDowell has been awarded the Hutton Medal by Royal Society Te Apārangi for his outstanding contributions to the knowledge of contaminant losses from land to water and informing environmental policy.
The Hutton Medal is awarded for significantly advancing understanding in the animal, earth or plant sciences.
A land and water scientist, McDowell works between AgResearch and Lincoln University making a major contribution to the scientific understanding of contaminant losses from land to water.
He studies how soils can be managed for environmental and economic benefit and is best known for showing how contaminants are lost from land and into water, and how to manage land to mitigate losses.
He has applied this knowledge to inform policy, making an immense contribution to the strategies used in New Zealand and overseas for mitigation of contaminant losses to water.
He has led multiple research programmes to provide advice on best practice farm management and inform policy to improve water quality, develop tools and practices for the management and mitigation of contaminant losses at multiple scales and improve understanding of contaminant – faecal microbes, sediment and nutrients, especially phosphorus, losses from land to water.
His work in 230 journal articles has been cited many thousands of times and has formed the basis of public policy and guidelines for good management of primary sector land.
“Often when met with a lot of change it can be a paralysis until you understand and sort the wood from the trees,” McDowell said.
“My interest is to present something simpler and more understandable.”
He acknowledges the hard work of NZ farmers who have long relied on and used science in their daily business.
“It’s about producing practical mitigation solutions; I see it as sensible regular farming practices with lower footprint, practicing what you want, when you want,” he said.
“A body of work targeting mitigations of critical source areas gets much better bang for buck, seven times better than an untargeted approach.”
Things must get better, we know that, McDowell says, to sustain and improve market access for exports and to meet community aspirations.
“We are at choke point, there is a lot going through policy and sometimes the science and policy are not kept up with each other – it becomes a case of rob Peter to pay Paul and the result is poor outcomes,” he said.
“Science and policy have to be kept in line, policies have to talk to one another and come in time to see the full impact for a good process.”
In showing how contaminants move, McDowell developed the concept of environmental phosphorus thresholds where soils cannot retain added phosphorus and become leaky.
He also helped develop the theory about critical source areas on farms and catchments, highlighting that most contaminants come from small areas of a farm or catchment.
This theory then helped to develop practical methods to reduce contaminant losses by targeting critical source areas with remedial action. Research then showed that targeting critical source areas with remedial action was up to sevenfold more cost-effective than an untargeted approach.
Recent research by McDowell and colleagues has identified dairy effluent areas on free draining stony soils, that are typical on Canterbury dairy farms, as critical source areas for phosphorus leaching loss into groundwater.
This is an important discovery because it makes it possible to treat the effluent to reduce the risk of phosphorus leaching from free draining stony soils.
In providing solutions to manage land, he and colleagues have developed many of the strategies available in NZ to mitigate contaminant losses to water.
These form the backbone of many farm environment plan systems and will be widely used when plans become mandatory for all NZ farmers.
He also has played an active role in informing and questioning policy by showing that 77% of contaminant loads come from small, unfenced streams, meaning that policy to only fence large streams wouldn’t improve water quality. This analysis was voted the best paper in the Journal of Environmental Quality 2017-2019.
McDowell’s research career began at Cambridge University and he went on to work at the United States Department of Agriculture before returning home to NZ.
Outside of academia, McDowell is chief scientist for the Our Land and Water National Science Challenge, helping to lead a team of 200 scientists in improving our land and water quality.
He is also a professor at Lincoln University.
“Implementing science is needed now more than ever if we are to collectively meet our aspirations for healthy food and healthy land, water and air,” he said.
