Great South yesterday released its The Beyond 2025 Southland Regional Long Term Plan, which shares aspirations for the region’s future economy, environment and people.
Project lead Bobbi Brown said the plan identified areas for growth, but also the challenges that needed to be addressed in order to achieve those goals.
It included the housing issue across the region and the need for workers.
"It’s like a jigsaw puzzle and it represents lots of people’s work and it’s all in one place.
"Because it’s so strong and unified together, it creates a very clear message on where we want to be in the future"
While the rural sector would continue to be the "backbone" of the region, diversification was paramount, she said.
Aquaculture and tourism were identified as main focuses in the plan for the local economy to be explored.
It was proposed to grow aquaculture in the region to become a $1 billion industry by 2035, and to increase its salmon production from 5000 tonnes to 40,000 tonnes per year.
"From a diversification point of view, it is a very significant opportunity," Ms Brown said.
"Because we come from such a strong foundation on the rural sector, you know, we’re in this beautiful position of being able to have so many opportunities on our doorstep ... we’re so blessed with the place that we come from, the natural resources, and then the people in it"
Mrs Brown said while the last long-term plan — the Southland Regional Development Strategy (Sords) released in 2015 — aimed to attract 10,000 people to the region by 2025, the focuses now would be to retain them in Southland.
The target was tracking well with an increase in population of 97,750 to 102,400 from 2015
to 2022.
"We need to keep building on the Sords goal of increasing our population but also focus now on retaining people.
"So that’s a really big message ... that we’ve just got such amazing talent in the region. We want to look after people"
However, to achieve that there were important barriers to be overcome. The plan identified housing and shortage of workers as major challenges for the region.
A lack of housing availability and the condition of the current stock, which was old and of poor quality, was creating stress for the ageing population and barriers for businesses.
With over two-thirds of businesses looking for staff, this showed the need for a co-ordinated approach, the plan stated.
Mrs Brown said for the next 12 months, they would develop an action or implementation plan which would prioritise projects, consider timeframes and resources.
"We’ll have a look at quantifying how we measure success because we’ll go through and prioritise some projects and we’ll look at how we measure ... goals and achievements"
Great South chairman Ian Collier said he was proud of the progress achieved.
"It is the end of the beginning [for the region.]"
