Land and Water Forum Report Pushes Local Planning

The release of the second Land and Water Forum (LAWF) report, paves the way for important public discussion and ongoing policy development round the complex issues of limit setting and allocation of our most precious resource – water, Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne said on the release of the report.

“I fully support the collaborative process put forward for the development of water plans with their communities, and it is well supported by the Local Government Sector as a whole. The Aorere and Sherry catchment groups and Waimea Water Augmentation Committee (Lee Valley Dam) are very good examples of this.”

“Regional and Unitary councils are well placed to deal with the water quality challenges and are already fully committed to addressing them, with some exciting recent initiatives including the recently launched national website and the sharing of best practice in dealing with water quality issues.”

“We look forward to the Forum’s continuing discussion about changes to Environment court processes which we do think need addressing by the Government if we are going to have speedier planning processes and less uncertainty for stakeholders.”

“We are, however, encouraged by the commitment of LAWF to set objectives for the state of our water bodies and we support the concept that different catchments will have different values and limits.”

“While we have different demands and geography to deal with all councils take water responsibility seriously. We have more than 450 scientists and other specialists working to understand and manage natural resources and we collect and analyse water quality data from over 1000 sites around the country. We also work very closely with land owners and communities to improve water quality, everyone has the same goal in mind – managing our most precious resource to the benefit of all New Zealanders.”

“Our new land and water website is a major milestone in our joint work to lift our game. It brings together water quality data from the 16 regional and unitary councils and presents it in a consistent way allowing users to look at water quality at a river, catchment, regional or national level.”

The new website is at www.landandwater.co.nz.