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an independent guide to New Zealand rivers and the outdoors

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How New Zealand protects a river

Water Conservation Orders, national parks and stewardship land do different jobs. The Mōkihinui River shows how they fit together.

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National · West Coast example
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People often talk about a river being “protected” as if that were one thing. In New Zealand it is several. The water itself, the bed and banks, and the land around a river can each be covered by different laws, run by different agencies, with different strength. Knowing which is which makes news about a river much easier to follow, and it explains why a river can be safe from one kind of development and still open to another.

This note walks through the main tools, then uses the Mōkihinui River on the West Coast as a worked example.

Cross-section of a river valley showing the water, the riverbed and the surrounding land the water bed and banks surrounding land surrounding land Water: flows, quality, character Bed: who owns it, what can be built in it Land: park, reserve or stewardship
Three parts of a river, each covered by different rules. A sketch, not to scale.

The water: Water Conservation Orders

A Water Conservation Order is the strongest tool aimed at the water in a river or lake. It can protect a water body’s natural, cultural and recreational values, and it can do that by limiting how much water is taken, how flows are changed, or what can be done to the river’s character. Councils have to respect an order when they write plans and decide consents.

Orders are rare. The Wikipedia summary of Water Conservation Orders lists sixteen since the first, for the Mōtū River, in 1984. Seven came before the Resource Management Act 1991 and nine after it, including the Buller River in 2001 and, most recently, Te Waikoropupū Springs in 2023. Getting one takes an application, a public hearing and a final decision by the government of the day, which is part of why there are so few.

What an order does not do is protect the land beside the river. A river with an order can still run through farmland, plantation forest or a town.

The land: national parks, reserves and stewardship land

Much of the land around New Zealand’s backcountry rivers is public conservation land managed by the Department of Conservation. That land comes in categories, and the category matters.

  • National parks are at the top. They are managed to keep their natural state, and adding land to a park is a formal step taken by the government.
  • Reserves and conservation parks sit in between, each with its own purpose.
  • Stewardship land is, in DOC’s words, a holding status for unclassified public conservation land. It is managed to protect its natural and historic resources, but it has not been assessed and given a permanent category. In practice that has made it the easiest kind of conservation land to open to other uses.

DOC has been working through stewardship land region by region to give it proper classifications. That process is still under way, and decisions on it are matters for the government and the courts; this site doesn’t take a position on them.

Consents: how a project is tested

Most proposals that would change a river, such as a dam, a large water take or gravel extraction, need resource consents from the regional council. Consent decisions can be appealed to the Environment Court, which is where many of the biggest river disputes have been argued. A Water Conservation Order, a park boundary or the type of conservation land all feed into how a proposal is judged.

Worked example: the Mōkihinui

The Mōkihinui River reaches the sea about 40 kilometres north of Westport. Meridian Energy proposed a hydro scheme on it in 2007. Much of the land in the catchment was stewardship land at the time, which the Wikipedia article on the Mōkihinui River describes as the lowest level of protection for publicly owned conservation land.

The project was cancelled in May 2012. Work then began to add the catchment to the neighbouring Kahurangi National Park, and in 2019 the same article records that 64,400 hectares of the Mōkihinui catchment, including 15 kilometres of riverbed, were added to the park, increasing its size by 14 percent.

The example shows the layers at work:

  1. While the land was stewardship land, a dam was something that could be proposed and tested through consents.
  2. Moving the land into a national park changed the starting point. Building a dam in a national park is a very different question from building one on unclassified conservation land.
  3. None of that, on its own, is a Water Conservation Order. The water and the land are protected through different routes.

Reading the news about a river? Ask three questions. Is there a Water Conservation Order on it? What kind of land does it run through? And what consents does the proposal need, from whom?

Other tools you will hear about

A few more terms come up often:

  • Regional plans set rules for water takes, discharges and activities in riverbeds. They are written by regional councils and usually include minimum flows for particular rivers.
  • Treaty settlements have given some rivers a special legal standing, and they shape how many others are managed with iwi and hapū.
  • Esplanade reserves and strips keep a margin of public land or access along some rivers, which is why you can often walk a riverbank even where farmland comes down close.

What this means for river users

For trampers and paddlers, the practical point is that protection status tells you something about what a river will look like in years to come, but not much about the day you are there. A river in a national park can still flood, change course or carry didymo on a kayak hull. The rest of this site covers that side: reading flow data before a trip, crossing safely or not at all, and looking after a river you use.