This five yearly State of the Environment (SOE) summarises key findings, trends and specific incidents of note from the Council’s State of the Environment monitoring programme.
Detailed technical reports on each of the resource topics in this summary are available on request from the Environmental Science section of the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council uses these detailed reports to inform change and to confirm our strategic direction. This information also provides a useful means of assessing changes in your environment over time, the effect these might have on your lives and enable us to collectively act on changes to our environment. Future science will focus on this integrated approach to information collection and communication empowering the community to help implement positive change to the Hawke’s Bay environment, whether they be cultural, social, economic or ecological.
A common theme throughout this report is climatic influence. The Hawke’s Bay climate is known for its extremes, being susceptible to both droughts and high rainfall events.
The New Zealand climate varies naturally from year to year and from decade to decade. Much of this natural variation is random, but there are two key natural cycles, operating over timescales of years, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). New Zealand is moving out of the La Nina pattern (forecast mid 2009) and into the El Nino phase, during which stronger or more frequent than normal westerly winds in summer will lead to increased risk of drought in Hawke’s Bay. In the longer term, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts that eastern New Zealand is likely to experience warmer, drier conditions. There could be more extremes in Hawke’s Bay such as prolonged dry periods and intense rainfall events, leading to more droughts and floods.
In the face of these climatic and human pressures on our natural resources, monitoring the state of the environment is crucial to help people make informed, sustainable decisions about their future use. Council will be increasing and focusing monitoring in key areas over the next few years, and seek to provide more efficient and useful ways (internet, WAP and text capability) of making this information available. This summary report is another way of presenting this information.
There are a number of challenges facing us in managing our natural resources into the future. These challenges are balanced by a more informed public (businesses, landowners and residents) with a greater desire to collectively manage our resources more efficiently and help reduce the impact of our regional and global footprint.
Land and Biodiversity
Hawke's Bay's hill country and mountains are approximately 75% of land area. Only about 12% is flat land, mainly the Heretaunga and Ruataniwha Plains, and the terraces along river valleys throughout the region. The remaining land is gently rolling country.