The Quality of Clarity: Lessons from the Sixty‐Year Struggle to Maintain the Purity of Lake Taupō

Sixty years of effort to protect the exceptionally clear water of Lake Taupō, the largest lake in Aotearoa New Zealand, show how environmental memory can help manage a cultural and natural resource. I describe how water clarity and quality in this lake have been protected, through managing soil erosion and phosphorus flows during the 1960s–1980s, and then by preventing dairy expansion and managing nitrogen flows from the 1990s. Throughout, the axiom that prevention is better than cure has been adopted. The shared goal of protecting the clarity of Lake Taupō has sustained cooperation in managing its catchment across central government departments, regional and local government, and with Ngāti Tūwharetoa. The result is that Lake Taupō has been our exemplar of integrated lake basin management for over 50 years. I conclude by examining why so few of the lessons of Taupō have been applied elsewhere.