Wai Connection | Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust

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Wai Connection was a national capacity and capability building project for catchment groups providing, coordination, guidance, training, expertise, community engagement, education and citizen science programmes to over 400 groups from 2022-June 2026. The project was largely funded by Ministry for the Environment, and was delivered by 13 provider organisations across Aotearoa. Some of the mahi delivered through this project will now be delivered through the Wai Collective programme.

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Background

Wai Connection was part of the Catchment Group Engagement round of the Essential Freshwater Fund through the Ministry for the Environment, alongside Regional and Unitary Councils, New Zealand Landcare Trust, New Zealand Resource Managers Association, NIWA, Horticulture New Zealand, Lincoln University, Foundation for Arable Research, DairyNZ, and Massey University. Together, these projects aimed to plug capability and capacity gaps to enable national restoration and protection of our waterways.

The Wai Connection remit was to promote collaboration between catchment groups, NGOs, hapū and iwi, regional councils, central government, and primary industries to help communities implement the Essential Freshwater reforms.

Our initial target was to engage with 100 catchment groups, providing them with training, support, and funding. The project delivered training and on-the-ground support to over 400 catchment groups, far exceeding its initial target.

Key Activities

Via Wai Connection, Mountains to Sea partnered with a huge range of scientists, environmental management and other professionals to delivered education and training that responded to catchment group needs. As a result, the project resulted in an activities such as:

Regional coordination - between local government and agencies, non profits and catchment groups, to assist in more targeted and connected action and more effective catchment management.

Broader community engagement - assistance with storytelling, funding and connection to businesses, and also events and projects that bridged the rural-town divide and recruited new volunteers.

Collaborative catchment management - providing experts, training and facilitation to understand best practice management that is specific to the ecological, economic and social conditions of a catchment.

Action - our sustained focus on enabling independent action resulted in catchment communities across the country upskilling in freshwater monitoring, catchment mapping, running events, planning and executing pest management and riparian restoration projects, and more.