This consultation is now closed. The next phase begins March to April 2024.

Let's Kōrero: Essential Freshwater ran from 26 October to 16 December 2022. The engagement asked people for their vision for freshwater, the values they thought as important in the six proposed Freshwater Management Units (FMUs) and whether the Council's approach in creating the FMUs was right.

Outcome

The engagement had about 500 responses in total with 109 comments on an interactive map and 115 survey responses and helped shape the next stage of the ongoing conversation about freshwater.

Records of meetings

Consultation

We're looking to create six Freshwater Management Units (FMUs) in our region which group together waterbodies of similar type into geographically defined areas. Every waterbody in the region needs to be contained within an FMU. Within each FMU we will set time specific freshwater goals and build our understanding of the values and issues at play in order to have better environmental outcomes and plan and prepare for the future. We have drafted our initial FMUs based on a few core concepts:

• Keeping it as simple as possible, fewer FMUs will ensure we aren’t over-complicating things
• Ki uta ki tai – from the mountains to the sea to ensure that catchments are not divided
• Grouping catchments of similar types (for example, Volcanic Ring Plain catchments vs Hill Country catchments vs Coastal Terraces catchments etc)
• Using catchment boundaries instead of rivers as boundaries.

The StoryMaps used in this consultation are no longer available on this website but are available on request. If you would like to see the FMU Story Maps, please email media@trc.govt.nz