Safeswim, Wai Ora and the NPSFM

Funding and willingness to pay are two of the biggest barriers to building core infrastructure. The 2017 election had healthy waters and clean rivers as a core policy platform for all political parties.

As part of the NPSFM millions of dollars is being spent to understand what the current state of our streams and rivers is throughout New Zealand, both urban and rural. The information which is being collected is being fed into decision making tools to determine the interventions required, both policy and infrastructure, to achieve outcomes agreed with the community. In urban communities the investment required in infrastructure will take decades to fund and build. In Auckland the investment required is more than $2 Billion required to address issues in our worst performing area covering part of the Western Isthmus of Auckland.

Many of our communities don’t know how poor the state of urban waterways are or what effect the discharge from those waterways is having on their health when they swim at their local beaches. They are not aware of the high frequency of contamination events and don’t understand the risks associated with swimming in the receiving environment despite Auckland having a number of beaches where the risk of becoming ill after swimming is high.

We now hold enough data to reliably inform the community about the risks of swimming at their local beaches. Over an 8 month period in 2017 Auckland Council moved from a retrospective sampling programme to a predictive interactive web based platform to make available the risk of swimming at 84 beaches in the Auckland Region. We are providing information on the risk of swimming now and the upcoming risk to people days in advance. People in Auckland can now make risk based decisions for themselves and their families about interacting with the water at their local beach.

The NPSFM is a long term solution to improving the health of our waterways and receiving environments. Until the NPSFM is fully implemented along with the supporting infrastructure we will continue to have the same risks and issues we have now. We have a duty of care to our communities to provide them with the information they need to manage the risks of illness to themselves and their families until the water quality of our watercourses improves. The experience Auckland Council has had in upgrading and transitioning to the Safeswim system will provide useful insights to councils implementing the NPSFM.

This paper will detail the Safeswim system we moved from and to, the improvement in our ability to predict risk, and how we are engaging with a city the size of Auckland to help people manage the risk to themselves and their families of contracting illness through swimming at their local beach.