Big efforts to protect Waikato rivers
Wild weather has not deterred landowners’ and council’s work on safeguards, writes
Extreme weather events have hampered Waikato riverprotection works over the past year but landowners and Waikato Regional Council have still managed to plough ahead with environmental protection work, including planting almost a million trees.
Waikato Regional Council confirmed it had worked with 341 landowners in the year to June 30, 2023, to retire 1726 hectares of land, plant 950,000 native trees and protect 137km of waterways with 230km of fencing.
A report on the council’s river and catchment planning and management activities for the year was presented to the Integrated Catchment Management Committee on September 21.
Waikato and West Coast Catchments manager Grant Blackie told the committee while the report gave some basic statistics, the story behind the work was a “lot richer”.
“If you think about the individuals and the iwi groups and everyone we have worked with in the past year then the story is a lot richer than just a table of numbers, although it is still an impressive table of numbers.”
Blackie also confirmed the continuation of funding from the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Hill Country Erosion Fund over the next four years.
“We’ve successfully obtained another $2.86 million to make it cheaper for landowners to do mitigation work targeting hill-country erosion.”
It has not been an easy year for river management, with floods impacting catchments across almost the entire region.
In his report, Blackie said the Coromandel River and Catchments team had to switch from planned river work to assessing damage, followed by remediation work including erosion control and protection, obstruction and vegetation removal and channel capacity reinstatement.
He said a request would be made to transfer funds from disaster reserves to fund the remedial work. It would take at least three years to fix the damage.
The story was similar for most of the eight zones in the Waikato region, including the Lake Taupō zone, where Cyclone Gabrielle caused severe and widespread windthrow of about 5000ha of plantation forest and other trees.
However, many key catchment protection projects were still able to go ahead thanks to the efforts of staff, private landowners, iwi and other groups.
Committee chair Robbie Cookson said the amount of work that landowners were doing to improve water quality in the region’s catchments was “phenomenal”, and many funded the work alone or through sources other than the council.
The council’s Integrated Catchment Management directorate worked in partnership with landowners to reduce soil erosion, flooding and the amount of sediment getting into waterways, and to improve water quality, river stability and river environments.
One way it did that was to help fund the costs of riparian and hillcountry fencing and planting.
This work was funded in various ways; from rates or by the council sourcing funds from other organisations like the Waikato River Authority, the Ministry for the Environment, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Waikato Catchment Ecological Enhancement Trust.
The amount of funding available to landowners depended on whether they were in an identified priority catchment or whether the council had secured additional funding for work programmes. It ranged from 35 per cent of costs to 80 per cent, depending on the type of work and funding available. Landowners can use their contribution as work in kind.
The council has divided the region up into eight catchment management zones: Central Waikato, Coromandel, Lake Taupō, Upper Waikato, Waihou/ Piako, Waipā and West Coast.