Client: Healthy Waters (Auckland Council)
Managing Freshwater Quality – A Revolutionary Way Forward
Te mauri o te wai (the life-force of water) is critical for us all. Healthy Waters (Auckland Council) is working in partnership with mana whenua, alongside industry and leading researchers, to improve the health of our awa and moana.
The starting point on this journey is understanding the water – where exactly water flows over the 5,000km² Auckland region, at what rate, how that varies with weather over time, and how this (combined with land use) creates differing water quality. We must specifically look at how fundamental processes respond differently for nutrients, metals, sediment, and microbiological contaminants across our catchments.
Once we understand all these factors, the desired result is to produce integrated, catchment-by-catchment action plans that are feasible and cost-effective to achieve water quality visions.
Morphum has partnered with leading US-based consultancy, Paradigm Environmental, to successfully develop the Freshwater Management Tool (FWMT) with Auckland Council’s Healthy Waters department. The FWMT is underpinned by a broader partnership programme with industry bodies, international and national researchers and most importantly, mana whenua (with Tātaki Wai the unique version in development for Kaipara Uri in Northland and Auckland).
Baseline Water Quality Outputs
Current FWMT v1.0 published works can be found on Knowledge Auckland including those co-authored by Morphum:
Baseline Data Inputs VIEW HERE
Baseline Configuration & Performance VIEW HERE
Baseline State Assessment (Rivers) VIEW HERE.
The FWMT is NZ’s largest and most comprehensive water quality planning tool
It addresses key challenges of the Resource Management Act and Local Government Act for rural and urban water quality. The FWMT advances two key decision-making challenges for council:
Strategic planning – identifying the nature of water quality problems and solutions (what, where, and how much action to take)
Adaptive management – identifying present and future water quality from altered land use, management and climate change (note: it will take years to decades before it’s possible to observe results).
Morphum has delivered on the innovation council needs by creating the FWMT to identify the net outcomes and costs across all feasible actions on both rural and urban land. The FWMT is innovative internationally because it then identifies the ‘optimal’ action plans – the set of actions that will deliver on a water quality target for least cost and long-term (lifecycle) cost to rate-payers, developers and landholders.
The FWMT allows council to better meet expectations for visionary change in water quality by providing detailed feasibility, cost and effects analysis coupled with strategic action plans.
Auckland Council scientist Dr Tom Stephens (Principal – Integrated Catchments) says the FWMT is a game changer. “Council has built off monitoring data including State of Environment records at 36 locations, to provide water quality data in 5,465 catchments spanning the entire region. The FWMT expands on monthly monitoring by providing sub-daily data with more detail about both short and long-term water quality. The FWMT provides uniquely rich information on contaminant sources within each catchment across 100+ urban and rural land uses.
The FWMT is a fundamentally different type of tool to most in New Zealand. We rely purposely on complex but tried and tested digital tools developed by the United States Environmental Protection Authority. The FWMT is unique for being able to assess feasible actions, determine the most effective for the least cost, and be tailored to individual catchment objectives and cumulative effects on the water’s journey from mountains to the sea.”
Taking the lead
Morphum leads development of key geospatial datasets, with our experienced and highly capable team providing novel GIS products and services which underpin the FWMT.
Our geospatial products included detailed LiDAR-based catchment delineation and assigning key biophysical and land use characteristics at high resolution (2x2m). The outputs enable the detailed catchment-by-catchment reporting on water quality in the FWMT, including responses to storms tracking across catchments.
Morphum has also digitised anticipated changes in development region-wide, assessing numerous factors and integrating a raft of geospatial tools to provide a representation of Auckland’s maximum permitted developed future under the Auckland Unitary Plan. Outputs enabling the prediction of Auckland’s future water quality are key to understanding where action will be needed.
Determining what’s possible
The Morphum team, led by Hana Judd, continue to raise the bar with FWMT partners at Paradigm Environmental, Koru Environmental and PerrinAg.
Action libraries have been developed across the 100+ rural and urban land uses represented by the FWMT, to determine their potential opportunities, localised effects and costs specific to each catchment. Outputs enable the FWMT to then optimise results by searching across feasible, unique combinations of actions in each catchment to deliver the best improvement for the least cost.
Telling the model what is possible from an engineering and scientific sense is critical to know if actions are feasible. The Morphum team converted real world designs of rural and urban interventions into accurate representations in the model to determine their effects on weather events and long-term timeframes.
Ongoing Innovation
A new tool developed for the FWMT can now rapidly and explicitly map intervention opportunities anywhere in the region. For example, the location, size and type of a stormwater device including the unique local area of catchment that is able to be treated.
This tool is a rapid way of assessing all potential sites where actions can be taken. This extends into rural Auckland for various edge-of-field mitigations like on-farm naturalised and larger constructed wetlands.
Morphum is now analysing the data produced from various pilots to deliver a regional tool to support council with strategic decision-making over the next 50-100 years.
Optimising Future Decisions
Building the FWMT is one of the most significant pieces of work Morphum and our broader partners have ever undertaken. Auckland Council is leading the way by, respecting the complexity of land and water, and focusing on process-understandings to deliver targeted action plans.
Region-wide action plans are expected to be completed by mid-2023. With $452 million of targeted rates earmarked over 10 years to improve water quality, council is moving to an optimal future using objective, digital tools to assess feasibility, equity and the effects of alternative management approaches.
“We’re really excited to see the learnings flow into holistic and process-based decision-making,” explains Morphum Director, Caleb Clarke. “This tool is designed to work in parallel with te ao Māori values and validates Morphum’s natural systems approach to help solve problems in a more sustainable way. That’s what we’re here for.”