Authoritative Land Information: What Are We Aiming to Achieve in This Area?

LINZ’s outcome in this area is that “people can be confident when making decisions and communicating in relation to locations within New Zealand’s Territory”.

LINZ is the authoritative source for core land and seabed information for emergency services, defence and security, land transactions, constitutional government administration, and safe land and sea navigation. Users of this information need to be able to take the reliability and fitness for purpose of certain kinds of information for granted. In some cases, it is literally a matter of life or death, in others, a risk to national interests. When integrated with other geospatial information, or otherwise processed, this information can also enable a range of broader economic and social benefits.

LINZ’s authoritative land and seabed information supports:

• Emergency service planning, preparation and response. This requires certainty about the location of hazards, incidents, offenders, victims and emergency responders.
• Defence and security of New Zealand’s interests. This requires certainty about the location of borders and boundaries, key physical locations, and threats.
• Transactions involving land. For people to transact land with confidence, and keep transaction costs low, the parties require certainty about property boundaries to correctly link to associated rights. Authoritative information is essential in defining the relevant property rights described in our first outcome area, Certainty of property rights.
• Government administration. Advice, planning and administration of statutes requires certainty of location of nationally significant demographics, boundaries, infrastructure and resources. This includes a range of constitutional central and local government functions, such as conducting democratic elections, place naming, Treaty settlements and sustainable urban development.
• Safe land and sea navigation. Ensuring safe passage for mariners and land travellers requires certainty over the location of routes and hazards.
• Development of federated land information opportunities. A wide range of other social services and commercial and recreational activities use geographical information. This information is often integrated with other information types, or otherwise processed, to add value for a particular purpose.

To achieve this outcome, LINZ’s activities are focused on two contributing outcomes.

Contributing outcomes

Access. New Zealanders involved in activities supported by LINZ’s authoritative land and seabed information can easily access the information required by their activity. Easy access means that it is visible, easily obtainable at reasonable cost, able to be understood, and able to be integrated with other land information as their purpose requires; be it immediate use or further value-add processing before use.

Confidence. New Zealanders who make decisions or communicate about locations supported by LINZ’s land and seabed information are confident in the reliability, up-to-date nature, and certainty of that information to fit their purpose.