Responses to our recommendations about managing freshwater quality

We requested this update because we want to provide public transparency on agencies’ progress with addressing our recommendations.

In 2019, our report Managing freshwater: Challenges and opportunities looked at how well Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland manage freshwater quality in their regions. We also looked at how well the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand were using data collected by regional councils to create a national picture of freshwater quality.

Overall, we found regional councils are working in a difficult environment, with a range of stakeholders and often competing interests. Despite these challenges, the four regional councils had made improvements in aspects of their water management that supported planning and targeting interventions to protect and improve freshwater quality.

However, the four regional councils could further improve how they shared information about freshwater quality, strengthen relationships with iwi and hapū, and commit to using a full range of tools for compliance, monitoring, and enforcement.

We recommended that:

1. The Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand lead work with regional councils and relevant land and freshwater management agencies to support better informed and co-ordinated management of freshwater by preparing a consistent approach to monitoring, analysis, and reporting of freshwater quality state and trend information.
2. Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland consider how they might use the analysis conducted by National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited to improve their monitoring of freshwater quality.
3. Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland support and inform wider community discussion of freshwater quality issues by ensuring that the information they make available to their communities is clear, complete, up to date, consistent, accessible, and readily understandable.
4. Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, and Horizons Regional Council strengthen relationships with iwi and hapū, especially those yet to complete Treaty settlement processes, by formally seeking their aspirations for involvement in strategic decision-making and identifying how those aspirations can be met.
5. Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland use a full range of appropriate compliance, monitoring, and enforcement tools to effectively identify and act on material non-compliance with the Resource Management Act 1991 or resource consent conditions.

Read what the Ministry for the Environment, Statistics New Zealand, Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland have said about their progress with those recommendations:

• the full text of Ministry for the Environment's letter in HTML | as a PDF (6 pages, 431KB)
• the full text of Stats NZ's letter in HTML | as a PDF (2 pages, 287KB)
• the full text of Waikato Regional Council's letter in HTML | as a PDF (7 pages, 535KB)
• the full text of Taranaki Regional Council's letter in HTML | as a PDF (4 pages, 239KB)
• the full text of Horizons Regional Council's letter in HTML | as a PDF (7 pages, 759KB)
• the full text of Environment Southland's letter in HTML | as a PDF (3 pages, 659KB)

We have not audited the information in this update. We did not ask regional councils to respond to our fourth recommendation because we plan to follow up through a separate process, which we will report on when complete.

At this stage, we do not plan to carry out any further performance audit work to follow up on our 2019 report. Our sector managers will continue to seek further updates from the Ministry for the Environment, Statistics New Zealand, Waikato Regional Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, and Environment Southland as part of their usual engagement work.