It’s time for decisions we
We need to make some decisions. ‘‘There’s no question that as a country we need to look at the resilience of our infrastructure, and we need to do that with a much greater sense of urgency,’’ Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said last week, the Taira¯ whiti mud not yet dry on his gum boots.
The trouble is, the time for urgency is long gone. Already the dangerous effects of climate change are being seen. Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary floods that preceded it had catastrophic consequences, hindering efforts to meet our very basic human needs.
Despite decades of warnings about extreme weather events, New Zealand was defenceless and overwhelmed by the brutal storms. Nearly six years ago, Jacinda Ardern called climate change ‘‘my generation’s nuclear-free moment’’. But her government became preoccupied with stopping the missiles and neglected to build the bunkers.
We have emissions reduction policies to generate 100% renewable electricity, increase the uptake of electric vehicles, build more public transport and even a carbon-neutral public service. Future us will be grateful, I’m sure, in the many decades they take to come to fruition. But as for the here and now – providing the basic needs of life: food, clean water, shelter, social connection – we are exposed to these looming environmental threats.
It’s not for a want of paperwork. In 2020, officials and academics prepared a climate change risk assessment that identified 43 risks – 10 of them urgent. And it’s fine work, if what you commissioned was a study of the bleeding obvious.
A year before that document was published tinder-dry conditions set a devastating fire in the Tasman District, which burned through more than 2300 hectares of land and led to evacuations of more than 1000 people.
The following month, mass flooding on the West Coast followed, due to a marine heatwave in the Tasman Sea. The flooding set a new 48-hour rainfall record for New Zealand of 1086 mm.
The year the report was published was the worst on record for weather-related insurance claims.
The $248m in claims paid included loss sustained during severe weather and floods across the Greater Wellington region in November and December, and a freak hailstorm that hit the Nelson-Marlborough region on Boxing Day. Officials did not need to predict the risks – they only had to look out the window to see it happening in real time.
Two years after the risk assessment came an adaption plan. According to the PR, this strategy was supposed to set out how we become more resilient. In that document, Taira¯ whiti features twice – in reference to past events. Hawke’s Bay is cited in a picture caption. Coromandel doesn’t rate a mention, nor do the words ‘‘state highway’’.
The document is full of goals –but no practical solutions. Much less on paying for it. Launching it, Climate Change Minister James Shaw said the most costly option would be to do nothing. And yet...
While Tasman burns, and some of our poorest, remotest communities drown, the Government’s bureaucrats fiddle with planning documents.
All good policy requires a direction of travel. Now we’ve got two... But we’ll have run out of roads before we get there. The most severe impacts of these more frequent and intense storms are felt on our road network. As part of the mission to reduce emissions, transport agency Waka Kotahi was tasked with reductions of 41% by 2035.
It was to reduce our reliance on private vehicles by improving public transport, walking and cycleways. But the agency’s budget didn’t expand to meet these new demands and keep pace with maintenance.
The cash pot took a billion-dollar hit from the pandemic and is forecast to be $30-40b short within a decade. Its fund for emergency maintenance is not nearly enough to deal with increasingly severe weather events and rising inflation.
Councils should pick up half the costs of repairing local roads, in theory, but they don’t have the money either. Some of the damage was exacerbated by forestry slash – an industry that sends a large chunk of profit overseas – and despite warnings, the Government failed to act.
The cost of repair – and lifting or relocating roads – will be astronomical, and politicians will have to make swift decisions about taxation and user-pays funding, and overcome their allergy to debt.
For safe and reliable access to drinking water, we need more storage, better protection from contaminants and more stormwater capacity, as well as protection from salt-water intrusion, reduced flow in drought conditions, and the relocation of low-lying facilities.
None of these is controversial – and yet the Government managed to make it so, as well as an unholy mess of reforms. If a new government is elected, those reforms will be repealed, setting that work back years.
The glaciers are melting faster than the Government’s climate adaption (which is supposed to form part of a huge overhaul of planning legislation, the Resource Management Act).
It is focused on managed retreat – where people are encouraged (paid?) to move away from coastlines and rivers that are at risk of flooding.
That approach is deeply fraught – moving communities with deep ties to a location is complex, sensitive, and likely to take decades. Vulnerable residents don’t have the luxury of time, and necessity may dictate greater protection (which we haven’t planned or budgeted for) rather than relocation.
Climate change materialised faster than the Government anticipated and passively waiting has now cost us time and options. It also cost many people their homes and some, tragically, their lives.