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Our plan for the next 20 years

Living in the ‘World’s Most Liveable City’, we’re the envy of millions of people around the world – and not just because of the freedom we’re enjoying while we keep Covid-19 at bay. We have beautiful harbours, great beaches, spectacular native bush and a unique volcanic landscape that creates endless opportunities for exploring.

Still, Auckland is facing some hefty challenges – our population is steadily growing, much of our infrastructure is ageing and we have the increasing impacts of climate change.

We plan far into the future to make sure we can manage these challenges so that you continue to enjoy top-quality drinking water and can be confident your wastewater is safely treated and disposed of.

We will be spending about $18.5 billion over the next 20 years – by far our biggest investment programme to date – to build and maintain our region’s water and wastewater infrastructure.

Catering for growth
Auckland is expected to grow by almost half a million people over the next 20 years, taking our population close to 2.2 million. During this time, we will invest $8.26 billion to ensure we can cater for this growth and allow business and industry to thrive.

Our growth-related infrastructure is paid for with borrowings and the money we collect in Infrastructure Growth Charges so that our existing customers are not subsidising our future ones.

Ensuring service reliability
To ensure you continue to receive safe and reliable services, we need a water and wastewater network that can withstand disruptions and be resilient to changing conditions. We’ll be spending $10.2 billion replacing pipes and upgrading other critical infrastructure to ensure our services are reliable and protect the environment in which we operate.

The impact of climate change
As your provider of water and wastewater services, it’s our duty to consider the environment in every decision we make. We are already on the journey to reducing our carbon footprint, with our goal to be a net zero emission company by 2050.

When we build new infrastructure, things like sea level rises are factored in at the design stage. And with construction responsible for a huge chunk of the world’s carbon emissions, we’re exploring innovative ways to reduce our construction-related emissions. Upgrades at our facilities will also reduce emissions from our daily operations.

Learn more about some of the key projects planned over the next 20 years below. If you’d like more detail, you can find our full Asset Management Plan 2021-2041 on our website.

Puppies

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South projects

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North-west projects

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Central

Find out which projects are happening in central Auckland. 

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North-West

Find out which projects are happening in north and west Auckland.

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South-East

Find out which projects are happening in south and east Auckland.

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Meet our new canine recruits

We’ve got high hopes for the newest additions to the Watercare team – our leak detection pups-in-training.

Leak detection dogs have proved successful overseas as a way of sniffing out hidden leaks in the water network. They’re already used in the UK, USA and in Australia, and we hope our four-legged friends will become permanent members of the Watercare team, helping us by finding leaks so we can fix them.

We adopted our six-month-old collie cross-breeds, who we’ve named Piper, Awa and Flo (as pictured), through Auckland Puppy Rescue and found them foster homes within the Watercare family.

They’re now undergoing intensive foundation training five days a week and are already proving to be fast learners willing to put in the grunt work.

Once they’ve mastered the basics, they’ll be learning how to sniff out chlorine gas to find the location of a leak in our water pipes. While the smell would be undetectable to us humans, dogs have incredible scent receptors which make them ideal for this type of detective work.

If the puppies graduate from training, they will be deployed in the field to help our crews pinpoint the location of water leaks – particularly in areas where loud noises and vibration make acoustic leak detection problematic.

In the meantime, our proactive acoustic leak detection programme continues. In the past year, we’ve surveyed about 5500 kilometres of our 9000-kilometre network, which has helped us to prevent the loss of more than 7 million litres of water a day.

Click the link below to watch a short video.

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Save water this winter

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