Cook Islands: Integrated freshwater and coastal management on Rarotonga

Project 2586 - PAS Implementing Sustainable Integrated Water Resource and Wastewater Management in the Pacific Island Countries - under the GEF Pacific Alliance for Sustainability

Indicator type

Stress reduction indicator

Baseline

Target

Result description "The purpose of this work was to trial different combinations of onsite treatment systems and Land Applications Systems (LAS) for treated wastewater disposal, to assess which combinations work best in the particular setting of the Cook Islands. The new systems were installed at nine homes, seven in what is known as the ‘Lagoon Protection Zone’ which requires higher levels of treatment due to the more porous, sandy soil type and three in inland areas that do not require such a high degree of treatment.
One of the seven systems installed in the Lagoon Protection Zone was installed at a community building. The aim of this was to trial how well the model installed would work with occasional heavy loadings.
The systems have been operating successfully during the time following their installation and this has paved the way for a new separate project for a larger scale upgrade of onsite domestic sanitation systems for the rest of the project area. This project has seen the almost complete replacement of 200+ outdated sanitation systems in the project area.
In turn, the success of this pilot project has resulted in a proposal, and funding commitment from development partners, for upgrade of over 1,000 onsite sanitation systems across the islands of Rarotonga and Aitutaki, over a 4-5 year period. It is likely that a similar approach will be utlised across the remainder of the Cook Islands. The original idea for, and the subsequent success of the IWRM trial project has therefore paved the way for a major investment across the Cook Islands which will lead to substantial benefits for the health of the people and the ecosystems of the islands, and therefore to the ongoing economic development and security of the country"