Needs and context

NZ2100 was first trialed in the inaugural 2005 Assessment of Water and Sanitary Services for Waitakere City, Auckland, New Zealand. Waitakere City has a population of 186,000, 15% of the people living in the Auckland region, and is one of New Zealand's fastest growing cities.

New Zealand enacted new local government legislation in 2002, requiring cities to regularly prepare Water and Sanitary Services Assessments (WASSAs) to support rolling three yearly Long Term Community Council Plans, that had a time frame of decades, and at least 10 years. The legislation required Councils to take a sustainable development approach and promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of current and future communities.

Waitakere City Council committed to Agenda 21 and to being an "Eco-City" in 1993 and had made initial steps towards development of quadruple bottom line (QBL) sustainability reporting. There was a need for a framework for a QBL assessment of water and sanitary services that would support integrated planning for development, not just in Waitakere City, but throughout the Auckland region.

Waitakere City Council required that the Water and Sanitary Services Assessment should be easily communicated to residents and planners throughout the region using multimedia. Creative Decisions was asked to devise a QBL assessment of water and sanitary services, and present it interactively using multimedia.

Quadruple bottom line framework

Creative Decisions prepared a CD/DVD-based multimedia information system, "Our water, Our future", for Waitakere City Council, to help present the 2005 Water and Sanitary Services Assessment (WASSA). This included innovative use of the NZ2100 sustainable development framework as a basis for the QBL assessment of services performance.

Within the WASSA multimedia information system, users could explore both the general definitions of the seven NZ2100 fundamental system qualities, and the definitions adopted for each of the 28 performance sectors. Cells within the NZ2100 matrix were colour-coded to indicate qualitatively the extent that performance in each sector was limited by issues identified. In other applications a formal scoring or risk assessment approach could be used.

Issues, vision and strategy

Issues were identified for each of the 28 NZ2100 performance sectors, and accessed within the multimedia information system by clicking on the appropriate cell in the NZ2100 matrix. Identification of issues was based on a large amount of information on the status of infrastructure and the impacts on community and environmental health. Much of this information was presented in the form of interactive graphics within the WASSA multimedia information system, so users could explore issues at a high level, and also, graphically, the information that lay behind these issues.

Alternative future visions were identified with reference to how these issues were resolved. Creative Decisions provided draft future vision statements for each of the issues, that could be further debated and refined within the Council, and in dialogue with the community. Users of the multimedia information system could select any one of the four aspects of health (social, economic, environmental, and cultural) and then choose any issue from the associated list to explore the alternative futures.

Waitakere City Council developed a draft integrated water strategy to illustrate how the city proposed to address the issues. This was also presented in a highly interactive way within the multimedia information system.