Water

Managing our waterways is an important task and we take great care and responsibility to ensure they can be enjoyed by all. We must balance the region’s desire to use water resources with a responsibility to ensure they can sustain our recreational use and be healthy habitats. Find out more about how water is managed in our region by exploring the content below.

 

Our current water management approach is detailed in the One Plan, refer to the Horizons’ combined Regional Policy Statement, Regional Plan, and Coastal Plan to get information about this approach and current targets.
 

Horizons Regional Council One Plan logo

Horizons records and processes a range of information around water in our region. This data feeds into research which helps us to understand trends, and track progress and risk over time. You can find this research on our website, explore our water content for links to related reports. Our data also feeds into the  Land Air Water Aotearoa (LAWA) website, a national programme that brings together data from all Regional Councils and Unitary Authorities across New Zealand. Through LAWA the public can get the most recent status of things like water quality for bodies of water around the country and compare the quality between different regions. LAWA originally held information regarding just rivers, which then expanded to include all water types and has recently expanded to include air and land quality information. Horizons’ shares data from our swim spot monitoring programme with LAWA on a weekly basis, the status of over 80 popular swim spots is displayed on LAWA’s ‘Can I Swim Here pages’.

Land Air Water Aotearoa logo