10.2 Plan Monitoring

The Regional Council will regularly check the effectiveness of the policies and methods in this Plan in achieving anticipated environmental results. This will be done every three years at the same time as reporting progress made by the community in achieving community outcomes for the Region. This amalgamation of reporting is logical because:

the anticipated environmental results in this Plan and the community outcomes developed for the Regional Council’s Long-Term Council Community Plan (LTCCP) are very similar, and
there is a strong connection between the policies and methods in this Plan and the projects and targets identified in the LTCCP. The methods in this Plan are identified as projects in the LTCCP.

This means that information needed for plan effectiveness monitoring is almost identical to that needed to evaluate progress toward achieving community outcomes.

Monitoring and reporting on the effectiveness of this Plan will be based on the following process:

evaluation of the Regional Council’s Annual Reports and the policies and methods in this Plan to assess which policies and methods have been implemented,
evaluation of the LTCCP and Annual Reports to assess actual work done to implement this Plan compared to the intended level of work each year, including consent, compliance and environmental incident response activity,
evaluation of the results of environmental monitoring carried out under the Regional Monitoring Strategy to assess the condition and trends of the Region’s environment, with an emphasis on those parts of the environment where specific work has been done to make improvements. (Note that a state of the environment report or update will be required every three years to meet the information requirements of this process), and
assessment of whether changes need to be made to policies and methods where there is slow or no progress toward achieving anticipated environmental results.

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Chapter 10 : Administration