What has been consented

What this actually is

A resource consent is the moment somebody is given permission to take from or put something into the environment, groundwater out, discharge to air, gravel from a riverbed, dairy effluent to land. It is the least covered and most consequential feed on this site: no newsroom reads it, and by the time anything reaches a newsroom the consent is years old.

Every row ends at the document. ECan publishes the full record of each consent at a stable public URL, so the “Details” link on a row is the consent itself, the conditions, the volumes, the monitoring requirements, rather than our summary of it. The register writes those links as http and answers on https, so they are upgraded on the way past.

The length is the part nobody publishes. A consent is permission for a period, and thirty-five years to take groundwater is a different fact from five. Where the register carries an expiry, the row says what year the permission runs to and, when it is twenty years or more, how long that actually is.

Issued is not the same as started. Of the roughly 11,900 active consents in the city, about 1,500 are “Issued - Inactive”: granted, but not yet given effect to. Saying "consented" of something dormant overstates what has happened, so those rows say so.

The legal section is quoted rather than the category, because it is more specific and is already written in near-English, s15(1)(c) Industrial Discharge to Air tells you more than "Discharge Area". Alongside it goes the catchment the consent actually sits on, with ECan’s internal number stripped off the front: the register writes "6640000 - Waimakariri River", and the number means nothing to a reader.

The date used is fmDate, when the consent commences, and it is genuinely current, the newest rows here are usually a day or two old. One limit worth knowing: this layer holds consents that have been granted. ECan also carries applications still in process or on hold, the stage at which the public can still submit on them, and those carry no commencement date to sort a feed by. They are here anyway, above the stream: an application cannot be put in a dated list, so it gets the panel instead.

The council’s capital works layer is the obvious companion source and it is on the map rather than in this stream, which is a judgement about shape and not about quality. It holds 2,160 rows covering the whole programme, of which 411 are actually in execution, but only 139 of those carry a start date, so most of what is being built right now cannot honestly be given a position in a dated feed. What every one of them does carry is a location and an estimated finish, which is a map layer: what the council is building.

Read live from Environment Canterbury, Resource Consents Active. This page refreshes itself every minute while the tab is open.

Every consent within a few hundred metres of one address →