Voting is now open for the 2025 local government elections. Enrolled voters will be receiving their voting packs from now until 22 September.

Close alert

Regional resilience. It's what we do.

We operate a 24-hour flood warning system with automated alerts from 50 sites.

  • Regional councils work to increase regional resilience to natural hazards and have significant obligations and responsibilities in times of emergency. Events or situations occur across many different landscapes, and include floods, landslips, geothermal activity, coastal hazards and inundation, volcanic activity, marine oil spills, and even pandemics – like COVID-19. Here is snapshot of some of what we do.

    • We identify, collate, analyse and provide natural hazard information to district councils and the Waikato Civil Defence Emergency Management Group, iwi, landowners and other stakeholders to enable better decision making to minimise risk and harm to people, homes, businesses and infrastructure – this information also helps inform our river management, flood protection and land drainage programmes.
    • We partner with district councils on climate change adaptation planning for communities that may be affected by increased flooding and sea level rise.
    • We have staff trained to work across all the functions (safety, intelligence, planning, operations, logistics, public information and welfare) of a Group Emergency Coordination Centre (GECC) for an activated emergency response.
    • We build and maintain our response capability by training dedicated staff and specialists to a national standard, and we also hold regular training exercises, for example, for tier 2 marine oil spills and to work as part of a GECC.

Stories about regional resilience

More information about regional resilience

Local elections are in October

Get ready to participate in local elections 2025 for the Waikato region.

Inform your vote