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Abstract
There is mounting evidence that urban development in New Zealand has contributed to
poor water quality and ecological degradation of coastal and fresh water receiving
waters. As a consequence, local governments have identified the need for improved
methods to guide decision making to achieve improved outcomes for those receiving
waters. This paper reports progress on a research programme to develop a catchmentscale
spatial decision-support system (SDSS) that will aid evaluation of the impacts of
urban development on attributes such as water and sediment quality; ecosystem health;
and economic, social and cultural values. The SDSS aims to express indicators of
impacts on these values within a sustainability indexing system in order to allow local
governments to consider them holistically over planning timeframes of several decades.
The SDSS will use a combination of deterministic and probabilistic methods to, firstly,
estimate changes to environmental stressors such as contaminant loads from different
land use and stormwater management scenarios and, secondly, use these results and
information from a range of other sources to generate indicator values. This paper
describes the project’s approach to the derivation of indicators of economic and social
well being associated with the effects of urban storm water run-off on freshwater and
estuarine receiving waters.