Improving the health of New Zealand’s freshwater catchments depends on all people working together to implement change. The Wai Connection engagement initiative was coordinated by Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust (MTSCT) and funded by Ministry for the Environment through the Essential Freshwater Fund, was created in 2022 to support that collaboration. A 2025 video with insights into three years of Wai Connection action is available here.
This year, before the Wai Connection funding concluded in June 2026, MTSCT commissioned CSI associate Miranda Cassidy-O’Connell to run a workshop series across the country to gather information and insights into the progress of freshwater catchment work in regions where Wai Connection had provided support.
Around 170 people from Wai Connection participating organisations attended the workshops, Miranda says.
“People were keen to contribute what they had learnt to help inform future decisions on freshwater catchment health in Aotearoa. It was clear that the Wai Connection aims of filling knowledge gaps and building connections across each catchment to coordinate action and effect change are proving to be achievable. But feedback from the workshops was that short-term and intermittent funding and policy flip-flops are limiting the momentum in most regions and undoing relationship and trust building in some.”
The report from the workshops includes recommendations on how to progress and fine-tune pathways to improving freshwater catchments.
“Feedback is that collaboration between local catchment groups, NGOs, marae, hapū and iwi, regional councils, central Government, and primary industries works. To sustain the progress that has been made, central and local government need to operate in an aligned and interconnected way, and ensure funding reaches the catchments where the work is happening.”