A three-year review designed to ensure better long-term local authority planning for up to 13,000 potentially affected properties in erosion and/or flood-prone Northland coastal areas is nearing completion.
The review began in 2013 and aims to update existing Northland Regional Council coastal hazard zones, most of which were developed at least a decade ago.
Councillor Joe Carr , who chairs the council’s Environmental Management Committee, said that the council has released draft coastal hazard maps identifying land potentially at risk of flooding and/or erosion by the sea.
“There are coastal erosion hazard maps for 31 sites and coastal flood hazard maps for 61 sites; all up these cover roughly 13,000 properties up and down the length of our east and west coasts .”
Councillor Carr said that the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement requires councils to identify areas of the coastal environment potentially affected by coastal hazards over the next century.
The council has chosen to do this through mapping, the bulk of which has been done on its behalf by environmental and engineering consultants Tonkin & Taylor Ltd.
Councillor Carr added that the high-tech and complex review takes into account a wide range of data and should enable the likely impacts of erosion and resulting shoreline positions to be modelled with a fairly high level of confidence right out until the year 2115.
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