Social Impact Assessment (SIA) for community resilience in the Upper Waitaki River Catchment, New Zealand

Abstract

This paper reflects on a regional land and water assessment and planning process in the Upper Waitaki River Catchment of New Zealand’s South Island, one of New Zealand’s largest river systems. For the past two years, under the auspices of Environment Canterbury (ECan - the area’s regional planning authority), a selection of local representatives, known as the Upper Waitaki Zone Committee, have worked closely with their communities, local government and an inter-disciplinary science advisory team, to develop a set of planning recommendations that will assist the Council in developing policies to realise the community’s aspirations for water quality, sustainable economic development, community well-being and resilience (ECan, 2012). The resulting recommendations package (ECan, 2015) includes ‘on the ground’ actions and catchment-specific environmental limits set to a level that will improve the quality of water in lakes, streams and rivers (while not thwarting opportunities for new rural business creation).

The specific focus of this poster-paper is on the social impact assessment (SIA), which was carried out with the Waitaki Zone Committee and communities as part of the participatory plan-change process. The paper first discusses how the SIA team worked together with local residents, water stakeholders and scientists to develop a broad understanding of social change in the valley (i.e., the co-production of an SIA ‘baseline’). The paper then provides an overview of how the SIA team worked with the community, water stakeholders, planners and the wider science advisory team, to explore and understand the social impacts of various land-use change scenarios.

The central theme of the paper is the need to assess social and economic impacts of water uses as part of an integrated process of planning and management of catchment water and land uses to achieve resilient community outcomes. Here, resilience is used as a term that refers to an integral aspect of the sustainability of social-economic and ecological systems and their ability to bounce back from disruptive events as well as slow onset changes, including government policies and plans for water. In this sense, an SIA is interested in interlinked outcomes that together could lead to enhanced resilience (Taylor and Goodrich, 2011).