The Marlborough District Council has various responsibilities under the Resource Management Act 1991. These include monitoring the state of all or any part of the environment, so that the council can effectively carry out its functions under the Act, and assessing the suitability and effectiveness of its Regional Policy Statement and Resource Management Plans.
Information from environmental monitoring has important application in resource consent processes and in providing advice on environmental issues to the community, educational centres (i.e. schools, the polytechnic) and resource user groups.
A detailed State of the Environment Monitoring report for Marlborough is prepared every five years, with updates in intervening years. Other reports are prepared on particular resource and environmental issues as the results of monitoring come to hand.
Assessing the suitability and effectiveness of the Regional Policy Statement and other plans generally requires monitoring information that has been collected over a long period. Some of the council's monitoring programmes have been in place for a number of years, others for just a few years.
Because of the expense of setting up these programmes, priorities have been set. Particular emphasis is given to groundwater and surface water, reflecting their value to the community and their vulnerability to over-use and/or contamination. Investigation and monitoring of the state of land and air resources are also included in the work programme.
