Flood Protection

The Wellington Region is a beautiful place to live. With our mountain ranges, winding rivers and many ocean-side cities and towns, we are lucky to call this place home. But we also know there is a flip side to enjoying that beauty, in the form of environmental hazards and risks posed to us and our properties.

We have flood risks from the 2,333km of rivers (and 19,365km of streams) that flow across our region. These risks range from loss of life to loss of land through erosion, to damage to property and buildings. Through our work, we aim to manage these risks to our community’s assets such as houses. We know how devastating flooding and erosion can be to the land, livestock and homes. Rivers wind their way through public and private land, so we work with our communities and land owners to manage the risks and impacts of flooding and erosion.

We do this in a number of ways including giving advice about flood hazard and how to avoid it, managing flood risk to existing development through building stop banks, and river stabilisation works including using rock and planting willows and other erosion stabilising plants. These decisions are all planned out in Floodplain Management Plans and river schemes.