Wai Connection

Establishing and assisting catchment groups with freshwater

Wai Connection is 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 in 3.5 years. Largely funded by the Ministry for the Environment’s Essential Freshwater Fund and attracting over $2 million of co-funding and counting, Mountains to Sea has collaborated with 13 regionally based ‘provider organisations’ such as catchment collectives and environment hubs, to deliver support to catchment groups of all kinds.

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Key Activities

Wai Connection has also partnered with a huge range of scientists, environmental management and other professionals to deliver place based and national upskilling, education and training that responds in read time to catchment group needs. As a result, the project has resulted in an increase in 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 - Assisting in storytelling, funding and connection to businesses, and also events and projects that bridge the rural-town divide and recruit 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 their catchment.

Getting to the Action - Our sustained focus on enabling independent action has 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.

Impact

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, and we have been working hard to deliver on that ever since.

Our initial target was to engage with 100 catchment groups, providing them with training, support, and funding. At the most recent count, the project has delivered training and on-the-ground support to over 400 catchment groups.