Around 100 people from across the Motueka Catchment packed a hall in Tapawera this week to work out how their community can live alongside a river that turned on them twice last winter, in a sign that flood recovery in the top of the South Island is becoming as much about long term planning as it is about repairing what was lost.
The interactive workshop was organised by the Motueka Catchment Collective, a group formed six years ago by farmers who wanted to look after the long term health of the region’s rivers. According to RNZ, the collective has steadily broadened its work in response to consistent feedback from locals who wanted to understand flood risk and what could be done about it.
The Motueka Catchment spans more than 2,000 square kilometres and is home to roughly 20,000 people, taking in farmland, forestry blocks and the towns scattered along the valley. That scale is part of the problem and part of the answer, because what happens to water in the upper reaches shapes what arrives downstream hours later. Our interactive map of where the Motueka River floods shows the modelled flood zones for the lower valley and the towns most exposed when the river breaks its banks.
The urgency comes from recent memory. Two major floods struck the region in June and July 2025, and the collective’s Dana Carter said one of them was severe enough to rank among the worst on record. “We had two floods in June and July and one of them was a one-in-a-hundred-year flood,” she told RNZ. “It was devastating for the community.” Scientists have compared the larger event to the historic 1877 flood, which remains a benchmark for the valley.
The financial toll was heavy. Repairs across the district have been estimated at around 50 million dollars. Insurance and central government contributions covered roughly three quarters of that, but the Tasman District Council was still left carrying about 12 million dollars, a sum that lands eventually on ratepayers in a district that is far from wealthy.
The human cost is harder to measure and slower to fade. Tapawera resident Sarah Jacobs told RNZ the flooding had reshaped her life. “It has affected me forever. It was life changing,” she said. Della Webby, from the local support group Tapawera Connect, said around 20 people in the area were still working through their recovery almost a year on, a reminder that the water recedes long before the disruption does.
Rather than wait for the next downpour, the workshop set out to pool what the community already knows alongside the science. Emily Lane, a principal hazards scientist with Earth Sciences New Zealand, told the gathering that the Motueka River has flooded repeatedly over the past 150 years and that, in her assessment, those events are becoming more frequent as the climate warms. Putting that long record in front of residents is part of helping people judge the risk to their own properties rather than relying on a single bad memory or a quiet decade.
The conversation in Tapawera was frank about the fact that there is no single fix. Mirka Parker, the Tasman District Council’s environmental science manager, summed up the reality facing the valley. “It is going to have to be a compromise,” she said. Decisions about where to build, where to retreat, where to let a river spread out and where to hold it back all carry costs, and they fall unevenly on the people who live closest to the water.
That is where the collective’s hands on approach comes in. The Motueka Catchment Collective sits under Te Tauihu Environment Trust and describes its work in plain terms, as plants in the ground, fencing along waterways and momentum built through people turning up. Its practical projects include planting streamsides, fencing off rivers from stock, restoring wetlands that can soak up floodwater and monitoring river health so that change can be measured over time. The group is now looking across forestry, farming and urban land use together, on the basis that reducing flood impact means changing how the whole catchment behaves, not just shoring up one stretch of bank.
Much of that thinking has been gathered into a catchment plan the collective released in March 2026 after years of collaborative work with landowners, scientists and the council. The plan is meant to be a living document, shaped by the kind of feedback the Tapawera workshop was designed to draw out, rather than a report that sits on a shelf.
The wider Tasman region is bracing for more wet weather even now, with heavy rain warnings in place over the long weekend, which gives the workshop’s timing an uncomfortable edge. For the people who filled the hall, the point was not to predict the next flood but to make sure that when it comes the community is readier than it was last time.
What stood out about the Tapawera gathering was who turned up. Farmers, townsfolk, scientists and council staff sat in the same room and treated the river as a shared problem rather than someone else’s responsibility. In a part of the country where rural and urban interests do not always pull the same way, that willingness to plan together may prove as valuable as any fence or planted streambank.
Have you been affected by flooding in Tasman or taken part in a catchment group where you live? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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