New Zealand’s Sustainable Water Programme of Action - Water and Agriculture: Sustainability, Markets and Policies - page 320

The sustainable water programme of action
Freshwater is a critical issue as New Zealand needs to improve its water management
framework so that it can better cope with increasing current and likely future pressures on
water. The Sustainable Water Programme of Action (WPoA) was established to deliver
on the water component of the SDPoA. The WPoA is co-led by the Ministry for the
Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The WPoA is two years
through what is intended to be a three-year programme. This paper describes the
problems and issues, and some of the solutions, the WPoA is considering. The WPoA
vision is outlined in Figure 1.
The WPoA aims to improve management of:

water quality — maintaining quality to meet all appropriate needs;

water allocation — allocating and using water in a sustainable, efficient and equitable
way; and

water bodies — protecting water bodies with nationally significant natural, social or
cultural heritage values.

The WPoA recognises that, given the range of peoples' interests in water, the current
framework makes it difficult to establish priorities for action. New Zealand's water
management framework is highly devolved to local government. 2 Central government is
involved in regional and local water issues only in a reactive way. The WPoA is
considering whether central government needs to be more actively involved in addressing
priority issues.

The New Zealand water resource
While New Zealand has abundant rainfall, it is not evenly spread geographically or
seasonally. In some regions of New Zealand demand for water cannot be met at certain
times of the year. Additionally, there is significant variation between rainfall in different
years and climate science indicates that the frequency of droughts and other climate
extremes is likely to increase in the near-to-medium future (Ministry for the Environment
2004c).
Growing pressures on New Zealand's freshwater resource are arising from competing
values as well as competing abstractive uses. The values and uses for water considered
by the WPoA include:

domestic

hydro-electricity generation

agriculture

2.

Local government is comprised of regional councils and district councils (and unitary councils
that perform the functions of both). Regional councils prepare regional plans and regional policy
statements which provide an overview of the resource management issues, integrated
management needs, and related functions in terms of the natural and physical resources of a
region.