Entry received from: Auckland Council
Category: The GHD Award for Excellence in Environmental Leadership
Healthy Waters is responsible for the health and well-being of Aucklands waterways and have identified some 4,200 fish passage barriers across Auckland that require remediation to improve native fish passage. Healthy Waters have developed a fish barrier remediation programme of work, which will seek to mitigate, on average, 10 fish passage barriers per year.
Given the scale of the programme, location of the barriers (within and adjacent to streams) and
the nature of the works, applying for individual resource consents for each project would be time consuming, costly, and result in delays to implementing the programme. However most barriers would need relatively small-scale works, often infringing just one or two standards, and could largely be managed using best practice methodologies and applying good environmental management techniques.
A 35-year regionwide consent was subsequently sought and obtained, enabling the majority of activities required for the programme to be delivered in a coordinated and efficient way, bringing significant benefits, including reducing costs, improving efficiency and ultimately delivering the desired environmental outcomes.
This approach is now being considered for other programmes of work across Healthy Waters and could be readily transferrable to other council organisations.
Thank you to our category sponsor