COVID-19 Regional Recovery

At Horizons, we are very aware of the impact COVID-19 continues to have on our communities. The initial phase of the pandemic saw our civil defence and emergency management role swing into full-time action to respond. Our emergency coordination centre was operational for 11 weeks and some of Horizons’ other core activities, such as our 2020-21 Annual Plan, were put on hold.

While our operations have essentially returned to normal, our emergency management team continues to operate in a monitoring function at the current alert level. To keep up with our activity in this space we recommend following our Civil Defence Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The economic and social effects of COVID-19 are still unfolding. They are likely to be severe and long lasting, and will result in significant challenges for the region. Unemployment is expected to rise, businesses to close, and measures in economic and social health to decrease.
 
In conjunction with the region’s seven local councils, we are working with numerous community and business groups, and organisations and agencies in the recovery. We are working together to ensure we have the information and knowledge needed to make decisions and seize opportunities that will see our region not just survive and revive, but thrive.
 

Manawatū-Whanganui Regional Indicators

A big part of our collaboration is finding ways to stimulate our region’s social and economic wellbeing. This work includes establishing a Regional Economic Taskforce, Economic Impact Assessments and ongoing reporting, as well as submitting over 88 shovel ready projects worth $1.05 billion that have the prospect of creating over 15,000 local jobs to central government for funding consideration.

We've worked with the city and district councils in our region to create a website - Manawatū-Whanganui Regional Indicators - to keep stakeholders updated on this work and provide key statistics around regional recovery.
 

Shovel-ready projects

Horizons is fortunate to have been successful in a number of its bids to central government. To date we have received over $18 million for environmental enhancement projects with the possibility of more to come, and over $26 million for climate resilience infrastructure projects.

We will continue to provide updates on successful bids as they become available and to view our current vacancies related to these projects please see here.