Council helps landowners retire 1726ha and plant nearly 1 million trees in 2022/23

Waikato Regional Council worked with 341 landowners in 2022/23 to retire 1726 hectares of land, plant 950,000 native trees and protect 137 kilometres of waterways.

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 Thursday last week (21 September 2023).

Waikato and West Coast Catchments Manager Grant Blackie told the committee that while the report gave some basic statistics, it was important to acknowledge the rich picture of community partnerships the numbers represent. 

“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,” said Mr Blackie.

Mr Blackie said one highlight for 2022/23 was the confirmation of the continuation of funding from the Ministry of Primary Industries’ Hill Country Erosion Fund for the next four years, from 2023 to 2027.

“We’ve successfully obtained another $2.86 million to make it cheaper for landowners to do mitigation work targeting hill country erosion.”

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 there were many who also fund this type of work alone or with funding from sources other than the council.

The council’s Integrated Catchment Management directorate manages catchments 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 does this is to help fund the costs of riparian and hill country fencing and planting.

This voluntary catchment and river restoration work is funded in different ways throughout the region, with funding coming from rates collected and/or by the council applying for funding for various work programmes from other organisations such as 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 depends on whether landowners are in an identified priority catchment or whether the council has secured additional funding for work programmes outside business as usual. It ranges from 35 per cent of costs to 80 per cent, depending on the type of work and funding available, and landowners are able to 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. A breakdown of the work completed in each of the zones during 2022/23 as provided in the report is in the following table.

Provisional Catchment Management Outputs: 2022/2023