Regional water security programme

Why is freshwater important?

We need freshwater to sustain and enhance our natural environment, to grow our food, for our recreation, households and businesses. 
 
Hawke’s Bay’s prosperity and success depends on fertile soils, a warm climate, and freshwater. 
 
However, our freshwater is coming under increasing pressure, and with increased volatility due to our changing climate, we will experience a less reliable freshwater supply.  

Regional Council regulates how much water can be used, to protect our streams, waterways, rivers and the wildlife that lives in and around our waterways.

Central Government is also looking to protect the health and wellbeing of our water bodies, with the freshwater framework, Te Mana o te Wai, which sets out how we manage freshwater - prioritising the environment and human health before our other uses for water.
 
We need to better understand Hawke’s Bay’s freshwater resources and, as a community, make decisions on how we protect and manage it. 

What is the water security challenge? 

In the past, we treated natural resources, including water, as if they were practically endless but we now know that’s not the case. Climate change and increasing demand are putting our water security at risk. 

While some communities are already facing the impacts of climate change on water security, the Regional Council’s work shows that if we don’t significantly change how we manage water, we will all feel the impacts on our environment, communities, and economy. If we don’t plan for water security, amongst other factors, we are likely to see:

Environment:  

• Water levels in rivers, streams and aquifers falling in summer due to reduced rainfall and increasing temperatures, meaning more water will need to be retained in the environment; 
• More volatile rainfall across all the seasons, leading to more extreme events causing serious flooding, slips and erosion. Despite that, we’ll have less rain overall; 

Communities: 

• Dropping river and aquifer levels could see more shallow rural bores run dry and urban supply under pressure; 
• Waterways drying and under pressure impacts recreational and cultural values.
• Reducing access to water creates social inequity and widens the gap between those who have water and those who don’t; 

Economy:  

• Reducing volumes of water available to our world-class primary sector, could see the following impacts;

1. Reduction in jobs available across our primary sector (which currently employs a significant portion of the Hawke’s Bay population)
2. Decrease in reliability of water impacting sectors confidence to invest and potential reversion to lower value land uses that are not so greatly impacted through loss of water supply reliability.

What is the regional water security programme?  

In 2020, the Government’s Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) allocated $30.6 million for a package of freshwater security initiatives for project development and construction activity, co-funded and led by Hawke’s Bay Regional Council. 

Regional Council, through their freshwater management policy and planning, has already implemented initiatives to manage and protect our freshwater, such as capping new water takes on fully-allocated catchments, setting minimum flows and limits for when water can no longer be taken from rivers.

The impacts of climate change means we need to accelerate work across the board to achieve sustainable water management.  As part of the Regional Council’s broader freshwater work the Regional Water Security Programme (RWSP) was established in 2020 to ensure ‘Hawke’s Bay has enduring, climate-resilient and secure supplies of freshwater, for all’.

What are the projects? 

 The projects associated with RWSP include the Regional Water Assessment which investigates options for reducing demand and increasing supply, a Managed Aquifer Recharge pilot in Central Hawke’s Bay and a community-scale Water Storage feasibility investigation for Heretaunga. The 3D Aquifer Mapping project was also included as part of the freshwater initiatives and co-funded with the PGF. This work, led by the Regional Council’s Environmental Science team provides improved data and information on our sub-surface and will be instrumental in supporting our understanding for key decisions in the future. More information on this project can be found here.

A whole-of-region freshwater assessment has been completed, which thoroughly investigated our region’s freshwater resources, including the growing gap between freshwater demand and supply in a future challenged by climate change.

We are looking at how groundwater systems can be supplemented during periods of high-water flows and small-scale water storage designed to offer environmental protections during dry periods.  

The programme is supported by and involves the Hastings District, Wairoa District, Central Hawke’s Bay District and Napier City councils. 
 
We are working with local iwi, interest groups and the wider community on what our freshwater future looks like.  

There’s more information about each of the investigation projects in the links below.