Sustainable catchment programme - Weaving science and community into action

Integrated catchment management (ICM) is a holistic approach to managing natural resources within a defined geographical catchment area. The management effort in catchments is often fragmented, lacking cohesion and focus and sometimes at odds with each other. These are complex issues with limited resources that councils can not deal with on their own. An integrated, strategic approach is imperative to ensure that efforts are as effective as possible. Fragmentation of catchment management can be on a number of levels including biophysical; scale (geographical and temporal); governance (legal and jurisdictional structures, institutional and stakeholder activities, weaving top down and bottom up processes); and management (objectives and issues, monitoring and research, interventions, interdisciplinary skills). Elements of ICM best practice that help address this fragmentation include political leadership and appropriate legislation; collaboration; effective community participation; clearly articulated roles, goals, and responsibilities; ICM champions; strategic approach; capacity building; adequate resourcing, and monitoring, evaluation and an adaptive management approach. The Mahurangi Action Plan is an example of a catchment based project growing into integrated catchment management. It is a five year partnership project with the Rodney District Council, initially focused on reducing sediment into the Mahurangi harbour to protect its long term health, while developing community ownership. It is a pilot project that has informed the development of the Auckland Regional Council’s Sustainable Catchments Programme. This programme provides an integrated planning and implementation framework that enables the ARC to prioritise and deliver interventions into catchments to address the long term health of priority harbours.