Everyone has role in resilience

It’s nowhere near comprehensive, because such a list would take weeks to compile.

Once it was, though, it would paint a picture of how some form of extreme weather is pretty much a daily part of life in New Zealand now, somewhere.

Anecdotally it seems rare, despite an advertisement that currently exhorts us to put aside ‘‘the weather waffle’’, for there not to be something weather-related to talk about on any given day.

Which suggests that most communities in New Zealand will have their turn to deal with a weather episode that threatens homes, livelihoods, and, in the most extreme cases, lives.

That raises some obvious questions about how well prepared we are, as individuals, communities, regions, for these potentially life-altering events.

The need to be prepared for the possibility of having our lives dramatically, and sometimes irreversibly, changed is part of the New Zealand psyche, based largely on the propensity for natural disasters, particularly earthquakes, to strike.

Some parts of the country, though, are far less susceptible to the possibility of a quake.

On Sunday night, the number of Auckland homes and businesses without power following a major storm last Tuesday had dropped from an initial 180,000 to somewhere between 500 and 1500, with crews from lines company Vector working around the clock in shifts to reconnect them.

More concerning for residents of Auckland suburbs like Browns Bay and Devonport, though, was the suggestion that around 500 might not be back on until this weekend.

In this day and age, that seems far too long, and may well point to a need for infrastructural change to guard against such disruptions in future.

After the Big Snow which blanketed the central South Island in June 2006 and saw some homes go without power for three weeks, there were numerous calls to underground powerlines. As a result, some small communities now not only have more secure power supplies, but improved Internet access, which was addressed at the same time.

Appropriately, our capital is part of the 100 Resilient Cities project pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013.

Because it’s resilience that we will have to develop in New Zealand – individual, communal, infrastructural – to cope with the challenges of climate change, which are only going to become more acute.