While the NRRP serves as an important base for planning and management of land and water in the Canterbury region, it was developed over a period of significant change in resource demands, governance requirements and community expectations. 

To ensure it is, and remains, appropriate for this changing environment, some aspects of the framework provided by the NRRP need to be reviewed.

Key requirements for an appropriate planning framework have been identified through the Ministerial Terms of Reference for Canterbury Regional Council Commissioners, the “Fit for Purpose Planning Review” completed in November 2010, and direction provided by Commissioners and senior management.  These include:

• a simple and robust regional planning framework for water and land
• a framework enabling implementation of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS), incorporating both regional and sub-regional components
• integrated management of land and water
• greater direction on appropriate resource management outcomes
• a plan which is easy to understand and administer
• the ability for people to quickly determine whether an activity requires resource consent
• a reduction in the number of resource consents required.

In addition, a National Policy Statement for freshwater management has been gazetted and a proposed regional policy statement has been notified.  Both of these documents give direction on land and water management and changes to the regional planning framework will be required to give effect to these documents.

As a means of providing a framework that meets these imperatives, Environment Canterbury has decided to develop a new Land and Water Regional Plan that will build on, improve, and in some instances replace, Chapters 4 to 8 of the NRRP along with embedding throughout the Plan the provisions currently found in Chapter 2.

Land Use and Water Quality

An essential component of this LWRP is the establishment of default provisions to manage the cumulative discharge of nutrients into the Region’s freshwater bodies.  The establishment of these provisions is a separate but directly related work stream that is occurring in parallel with the LWRP development.

The output of this project will be region-wide provisions, including catchment nutrient loads, to manage the cumulative effects of land use (and particularly land use intensification) on freshwater quality in under-allocated, fully-allocated and over-allocated catchments.  These will form a default position for managing water quality, recognising that the CWMS committees may wish to amend load limits, or to introduce more specific polices and/or load limits, at a later time.  It is envisaged that this would occur through specific catchment or sub-regional plans.

Given the clear directives set by the CWMS and the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management 2011, there is a need for the default position to be clearly established in the LWRP as soon as possible.

This project is about developing these catchment load limits and policy provisions.

The most significant challenges for this project include altering landowner behaviour to reduce nutrient losses to achieve catchment load limits, and to incorporate existing authorised discharges into the new regime in an equitable way.

Plan Structure

A diagrammatic structure for this Land & Water Regional Plan is shown below.

Download the Proposed LWRP diagram (65 kB)