Hinewai Ormsby: Securing the region's life force – Te Mauri o te Wai

Poor water-management decisions of the past have meant huge volumes of the region's water have been allocated to a small number of commercial operations, writes Hinewai Ormsby. Photo / Supplied

The most precious things in our world – the things we value the most – tend to be the scarcest.

And this is no truer when it comes to freshwater.

As economies grow, as the world needs more food for a growing population and as the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt, our water is increasingly scarce – and very much under-valued.

This is exactly what is happening in Hawke's Bay. Wai is the life force of our region – there is no more valuable or precious resource. The challenge is that our freshwater is a finite resource and there are many growing and competing demands for it. As a region we always want more, and "supply" is increasingly irregular, as the drought of last summer showed.

The secure supply of freshwater is a hugely emotive issue for everyone. We cannot survive without it.

About 70 per cent of the Hawke's Bay Regional Council's work is focused on water in the broadest sense – from flood protection to coastal erosion, to protection of waterways and, increasingly, to ensuring fair, equitable and climate-resilient supplies of freshwater for everybody.

The regional council is working with urgency on a comprehensive water security programme for Hawke's Bay. At its heart is a comprehensive Regional Water Assessment report. This might sound like just another report but it is much more than that.

Readers might be surprised to learn that we have never had a full, scientific stocktake of our region's freshwater.

The Regional Water Assessment will take a year to complete and will provide the people of Hawke's Bay with a full breakdown of how much water we have, where it is, how much we use, who uses it and to what benefit.

The Regional Water Assessment will show us the scale of the gap between our demand for water and our ability to supply it. We must have this information in order to make the right decisions and we must discuss these solutions with courage as a community.

I expect this will be challenging information for our council and our communities. It has the potential to be divisive given the competing social, commercial, environmental and cultural demands we all place on our water.

The Government's Te Mana o te Wai policy gives the first priority to protect freshwater in our environment, the second priority to human needs and the third priority to other uses.

Based off the best data, the Regional Water Assessment will highlight a number of interventions we can take to better secure our freshwater supplies. What we know now is there will be no single silver bullet for Hawke's Bay.

Rather, we are likely to need contributions from wherever they can be made, for example: education and investment in water conservation and efficiency, new approaches to irrigation, land use and water storage.

Our commitment as a regional council is to put all this data and these options in the public domain and discuss them openly, honestly and transparently. How we secure our freshwater is a challenge for every one of us and, while we will have to balance competing demands, we are committed to listening and working through our available options.

We have to confront the poor water-management decisions of the past which have meant huge volumes of the region's water have been allocated to a small number of commercial operations. We will have to make decisions that see us all live within limits and live in a better balance with nature.

We will keep the community up to date with these investigations. By the time of the completion of the Regional Water Assessment we expect to have well-developed options to take to the community for us to collectively consider.

As a first-time councillor and chair of the Environment and Integrated Catchments Committee, the challenge of understanding the state of our regional wai māori (freshwater) supply is immense. What we need to take are the mighty and rapid steps in reducing the supply and demand gap for our entire region into the next 10 years to make a positive difference for the consecutive 10 years.

• Hinewai Ormsby is a Hawke's Bay regional councillor and chairs the council's Environment and Integrated Catchments Committee.