Clause 3.3: Long-term visions for freshwater

Long-term visions are a critical part of the NPS-FM. Including them is one of the key changes in this version of the NPS-FM. They provide for long-term planning, beyond the 10-year review cycle of individual plans.

The vision should set an ambitious but achievable goal that represents what communities and tangata whenua want to see for their water bodies.

Long-term visions must set out the ambitious, but reasonable, timebound goals for the freshwater in an FMU or catchment. A single regional long-term vision is not allowed.

Councils must develop their vision through engagement with communities and the active involvement of tangata whenua. Councils should give enough information for tangata whenua and communities to understand what will be an ‘ambitious but reasonable’ vision for the FMU, and an appropriate timeframe. An understanding of the current state of the water bodies and the pressures on them will inform this. An understanding of the history of a water body can inform what is possible for the future.

Councils must set out whether the FMU can currently provide for its vision, or whether improvements are required. This indicates at a high level if there is over-allocation and when it will be addressed.

Why are long-term visions important?

Long-term visions direct the other steps in the NOF process. At each step the council must demonstrate how it is achieving the vision:

• environmental outcomes for values, clause 3.9(5)(b)
• TASs (but may do so by setting 10-year interim goals), clause 3.11(7)
• limits on resource use, clause 3.14(2)(a)(ii)
• environmental flows and levels, clause 3.16(2)(a).

Councils must also assess their progress in regular state-of-the-environment reports, clause 3.30(2)(a)(i).

The NPS-FM requires the active involvement of tangata whenua (to the extent they wish) and engagement with the community when developing long-term visions, but it does not prescribe how and when to do this.

For this engagement, councils may include other aspects of giving effect to the NPS-FM. However, the various parts of the NPS-FM plan framework should be developed sequentially and also provide the opportunity to re-visit parts of the NOF (iterative process). While it would not be appropriate to draw up limits and then retro-fit a vision to suit these, an iterative process means that once the limits needed to achieve outcomes and values are established, the community may then weigh up the relative costs and benefits and seek to change the values and TASs accordingly.

Documents such as Waitangi Tribunal reports and iwi management plans may already describe the aspirations of tangata whenua for water bodies. Councils should engage with iwi and hapū on this information, because it may inform their long-term visions. The historic state of water bodies will also be informative. Communities often aspire to returning water bodies to a state they remember enjoying in their childhood, for example, being able to swim in a particular river again.

The objectives for the Essential Freshwater package may indicate a ‘reasonable’ timeframe for certain goals. The package had an objective to:

• stop degradation immediately
• reverse it in the short to medium term
• restore the health of water bodies in a generation.

Long-term visions that set both long- and short-term goals and timeframes may be appropriate. For example, some aspects of a vision may be achievable in the short term and others may take longer. Setting different timeframes avoids delaying short-term goals if other goals will take longer to achieve. This may be the case where different parts of an FMU are in different states, or where goals for water quality can be reached sooner than for water quantity.

If the water body is nearing an ecological tipping point, after which recovery is difficult, councils could include a very short-term goal to halt this decline. They could then set a longer-term goal to move the water body away from this high-risk state, which might include progressive stages of improvement. This should align with the ultimate, aspirational goal and timeframe that gives effect to Te Mana o te Wai, as decided with tangata whenua and the community.