Watersmart

Concrete and asphalt don't just reflect heat; they store it. All day, every hot day, through a dry El Niño summer especially.

The mechanism is straightforward: sealed, dark surfaces absorb solar radiation and hold it as the day goes on. Rain can't get through sealed concrete, so the soil underneath dries out, and without moisture in the ground, cities lose the natural cooling effect that comes from evapotranspiration, the process that keeps parks and tree-lined streets noticeably cooler than a car park on the same block.

El Niño makes this worse before it makes it better. Dry conditions reduce moisture for street trees and green spaces further, wilting foliage and thinning the shade cover that would otherwise offset some of that stored heat. And when the dry spell does break, it's often with the kind of intense, isolated downpour El Niño tends to produce in eastern regions, rain that a dried-out, hardened surface sheds rather than absorbs

Permeable paving works on both problems at once. Porous Lane lets water pass directly into the subgrade instead of running straight to a stormwater drain, which keeps moisture available to tree roots and helps the surface itself hold less heat, since it's not a solid heat-storing mass in the same way.

Not a fix for a hot summer on its own, but it's one of the few interventions that works on heat and stormwater at the same time, which matters when a season brings both.

🔗 Learn more: https://www.watersmart.co.nz/news/how-to-reduce-heat-island-effects-caused-by-el-nio

"Dry summer coming" is the headline. It's also only half the story, and the half that gets left out is the one causing the expensive surprises.

NIWA has declared a strong El Niño, expected to peak over the 2026–27 summer, with a real chance of ranking among the strongest on record. The assumption most people are working from is that this means less water, nationwide. It doesn't. El Niño doesn't remove rain from the country, it moves it.

The north and east are drying out. The west is getting wetter, and wetter doesn't just mean more rain, it means more flood risk, driven as much by intensity as by volume.

Two very different problems, happening in the same season, a few hundred kilometres apart. A water security plan built for one region doesn't transfer to the other, and a generic "El Niño prep" checklist misses that split entirely.

The useful starting point isn't a national forecast. It's a site assessment: which risk actually applies here, where water would enter or run off this specific property, and what a realistic event looks like for this location. Preparation designed in at that stage is far cheaper than anything retrofitted after the damage is already done.

Not sure which risk applies to your site? The full regional breakdown is linked below, or get in touch and we'll help you work out what to actually prepare for.

🔗 https://www.watersmart.co.nz/news/el-nino-nz-flood-drought-risk

Our Sales and Operations Manager, Simon Carter, spent the day at Property Council New Zealand's Enabling Auckland: Infrastructure for Growth event and came back with one point worth repeating: infrastructure keeps following demand, when it needs to lead it.

Auckland's housing and intensification targets are ambitious. The transport, water and wider infrastructure to support that growth has to be planned, funded, and delivered in the right places ahead of time, not retrofitted once the pressure's already showing.

One development from the day stood out: infrastructure capacity maps that give the development sector better visibility of current network conditions. Knowing where constraints actually sit, earlier, gives developers, designers and infrastructure providers more runway to find the right response, rather than discovering a capacity problem partway through a consenting process.

From where we sit, those responses don't always have to mean a bigger pipe or a new reservoir. Sometimes it's staging development differently. Sometimes it's on-site or precinct-scale systems that take pressure off centralised infrastructure rather than adding to it.

The ambition isn't really in question. The real test is whether planning, funding and delivery can move in step with it.

🔗 Read the five key insights we took from the discussion: https://www.watersmart.co.nz/news/infrastructure-before-intensification

Until now, the granny flats exemption has had a quiet grey area in the legislation: the rules didn't clearly allow for a granny flat to connect via the existing dwelling's utility connection. This meant councils often had little choice but to require a wholly new one, even when the existing connection would have done the job for a fraction of the cost.

MBIE has confirmed that changes closing that gap take effect on 8 October 2026. Granny flats will be able to connect via the primary dwelling's existing water, wastewater and stormwater services, rather than defaulting to a new connection, provided council or utility approvals are in place.

The part specifiers and councils still need to check hasn't changed. The existing system has to have the capacity, and still comply with the Building Code. A connection designed for one dwelling doesn't automatically have headroom for two.

Where it doesn't, or where no connection is available, a compliant on-site system is still the fallback. That's worth identifying at the PIM stage, before design work gets too far along, since a capacity shortfall found late is a far more expensive problem to fix.

Full guidance goes live on MBIE's Building Performance website from 8 October.

If you're assessing whether an existing connection has room for a second dwelling, we're happy to talk through what that capacity check actually involves.

FenceTank started with a problem most specifiers know well: rainwater tanks need space, and on today's smaller residential sites, that space is often the first thing to go. So we moved the tank to the boundary line instead.

The engineering was the straightforward part. Boundary-mounted tanks weren't something the regulations had anticipated, so getting there meant years of technical validation and testing, including securing an MBIE Determination confirming FenceTank doesn't pose a fire risk to neighbouring properties, a question that had been an open barrier to specifying it with confidence.

That groundwork is done, and there are now more than 450 FenceTank systems installed across New Zealand, providing close to 500,000 litres of rainwater storage on sites where space for a conventional tank is often the limiting factor.

It's a reminder of what real innovation actually involves, not just a better design, but the years of unglamorous work that make it something you can put in front of a consenting authority without a second thought.

We’re thrilled to be Next!

Announced today by the Business Network, this annual list celebrates the innovators, entrepreneurs, projects and organisations named as finalists in the 2026 Sustainable Business Awards.

Watersmart is proud to be a finalist for the Market Mover Award, which recognises organisations using their influence to guide customers, suppliers, partners and their wider sector toward more circular, regenerative and equitable outcomes.

The list shines a spotlight on the people and ideas helping make Aotearoa New Zealand a global beacon of sustainable business, and we’re thrilled to be part of it!

Discover who’s Next:
https://sustainable.org.nz/sustainable-business-awards/finalists/

Less than 1% of the world's water is fresh and usable. Global demand for it is projected to rise 20-30% by 2050.

For a long time, the answer to rising demand was more supply: bigger reservoirs, new bores and expanded network capacity. But adding capacity is becoming harder to consent, harder to fund and slower to deliver than many project timelines allow for.

That changes the brief for anyone specifying or building today. Water performance isn't just a compliance line anymore. It's a design decision that can affect consent conditions, network capacity and long-term operating costs.

Capturing rainwater on-site, recycling greywater and reducing what a development pulls from the mains isn't just a sustainability add-on. Increasingly, it can help reduce pressure on shared infrastructure and avoid the need for costly upgrades later.

The sites that plan for water at design stage aren't just being responsible. They're designing out a problem that's likely to become more expensive to solve later.

Working on a project where water demand or network capacity could become a constraint? Talk to Watersmart early. We can help design the right water strategy into the project from the start.

Pavement used to have one job: hold up under load. Now it's also expected to manage stormwater, avoid cracking around tree roots, and not make the street hotter than it already is, usually all on the same project.

That gap is what Klaudia spoke to at Black Art 2026 last week, CCNZ's technical event for the pavement and asphalt sector at Due Drop Events Centre. Her session introduced Porous Lane, not as a replacement for conventional pavement, but as an option for the specific conditions where it keeps falling short: stormwater overwhelming the drainage design, roots pushing up the surface, and dark pavement adding to urban heat. It's made from recycled tyre rubber too, which does real work on embodied carbon rather than just sitting on a spec sheet as a nice-to-have.

Hutt City Council and Fulton Hogan have already used it this way, protecting a stretch of established Pōhutukawa while keeping the surface fully trafficable, which is a decent proof point in front of a room of people who install pavement for a living and know exactly how it tends to fail.

Contractors are increasingly being asked to solve more than the surfacing brief these days; stormwater, tree health and carbon are all part of the job now, whether or not it's written into the spec. It's good to see the conversation shift toward where these tools actually fit, rather than whether they work at all.

We’re at the Water New Zealand Conference & Expo 2026 tomorrow , running 22-24 September in Hamilton.

If you’re a developer, commercial property owner, architect, engineer or consultant dealing with tighter stormwater requirements, flood risk, water supply constraints or rising infrastructure costs, come and talk to the Watersmart team at stands 110 & 111, close to the coffee carts.

We can help you look at the whole water picture for a site, including how to:
- Reduce demand on mains water
- Manage stormwater more effectively
- Build flood resilience into a development
- Avoid costly infrastructure upgrades where possible
- Identify practical water reuse, storage and attenuation options early in the design process

The earlier these issues are considered, the more options there usually are to solve them efficiently.

So if you’ve got a project where water is becoming a constraint, a cost or a consenting challenge, come and have a chat with us.

📍 Stands 110 & 111 (close to the coffee carts)
📅 22-24 September 2026

Not registered yet? Tickets are still available via the Water New Zealand Conference website.