Abstract
Leaking water system infrastructure in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) poses risks to public health and wastes precious public funds—estimated at around $122 million per year. In this Briefing, we estimate NZ’s national leakage level, finding that 22% of water is lost through leaks in water systems. This is far worse than leading European countries such as the Netherlands (5%) and Germany (6%). A more sophisticated metric (the Infrastructure Leakage Index), also suggests NZ is ranked near the bottom of a list of 15 jurisdictional groupings with data (the median index score for NZ is 2.7 compared to 0.7 for Denmark).
While there has been some recent progress, such as intensified work on leak repairs and water metering, additional central and local government investment is needed to upgrade critically important water system infrastructure.