NIWA Essential Services: COVID-19

NIWA’s priority at all times is on the wellbeing, health and safety of our staff working across the country delivering excellent research and associated science services for the benefit of all New Zealanders.

We specifically need to maintain essential services for the Government. These are broadly defined as hazard monitoring, resilience, diagnostics for essential services like biosecurity, maintaining animal facilities, and infrastructure that requires constant attention (e.g., security of samples, collections and computing facilities), as follows.

• Maintaining aquaculture stock and associated systems at the Northland Marine Research Centre, Bream Bay.
• Providing toxic algal analytical services for drinking water and aquatic recreation.
• Providing High Performance Computing Facilities to support operational weather and hazard forecasting (including floods, pest surveillance, fires).
• Providing biosecurity incursion surveillance and associated bio-hazard responses.
• Maintaining living and other collections of micro-, macro-, and aquatic organisms that support New Zealand.
• Maintaining national environmental monitoring networks for hydrology, climate and weather, atmospheric chemistry and waves to support operational systems in organisations such as regional and city councils and the primary production sector, and for natural resource and hazards management decisions across New Zealand (e.g., freshwater abstraction for irrigation, flood hazards, air quality assessment).
• Maintaining NIWA’s research vessels.
• Maintaining NIWA site physical and IT infrastructure to enable ongoing services and their delivery to the rest of New Zealand.

NIWA sites are currently closed to non-essential staff, and other staff are working from home, but we remain on stand-by to provide any additional support the Government might require.