Holding back the tide

Government responds.

Sixty-three of the country’s 78 councils have coastal boundaries. They’re all at different stages when it comes to addressing coastal hazards. Some have barely given it a thought.

The basics of the Hawke’s Bay situation are this: in 2014 Hastings District Council,

Napier City Council and

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council agreed to work together in establishing which bits of the coast were affected, how they were affected, what solutions might work, and how residents would be involved.

The strategy looks at the coast between the cape and Tangoio, north of Napier, splits it into 15 ‘‘cells’’, predicts the effect of coastal erosion in 50 and 100 years’ time, and proposes response options. Called ‘‘pathways’’, they can include renourishment, groynes, sea walls or managed retreat.

The head of the strategy,

Peter Beaven, says he thought getting to this stage would be the easy bit. He knows now it wasn’t. The tricky bit will be broaching subjects such as funding and when the pathways should be kicked into action.

‘‘The problem is that we’re at the leading edge of all of this, and any agreement we might get from them will be precedentsetting, and the Government will be very careful about how any conversation goes.

‘‘If you’re the Government and you know you have to do something about global warming and its consequences, and you want to think about what that might look like, one possibility is for them to fund or assist to fund protection for their own assets along the coastline of the country, and at the moment they’re not doing it. I think they should be and that’s a conversation we’ll need to have.

‘‘We’ve got some real problems because the government’s been completely inactive in this space until very recently. I compare that to Britain, where the government has been right round the entire coastline and told local bodies what they had to do, and helped fund it.’’

Getting community representatives appointed to the group early on, holding public meetings and giving affected people access to experts has been critical in getting to this stage, Beaven says.

Martin Bates, a community representative for the Clifton/te Awanga cell from the outset, agrees.

‘‘At the end of the day, the ratepayer will be paying for it. It’s people’s lives we’re talking about. The council for many decades has been allowing new development along the coast, so they have some responsibility in this. In each community there is a great deal of misunderstanding about what the threats are and what has or hasn’t happened.

‘‘Getting it on the table, out in the open and making sure the information is fed back to the community is important. We’ve done that through public meetings, a newsletter and making sure the four representatives were talking to people.’’

While working out cost and who pays, the group also needs to work out the times at which something needs to be done. Trigger points, they’re called.

‘‘It’s the point at which we determine we have to go ahead with groynes, or a sea wall, or managed retreat, or whatever the strategy is for that part of the coastline. The trigger point could be reached by insurance companies refusing to provide cover for an area any longer; it could be because there were multiple inundations in an area,’’ Beaven says.

‘‘We’re dealing with the interests of a whole lot of people who dwell on the coast and whose first instinct, completely understandably, is to stay and fight, and fund the fight. But there will be a point when we have to say that’s no longer a sensible or viable option and we have to do something else.’’

A fund is being set up to pay for the work that will be required. Ratepayers will contribute, probably starting in the next few years, Beaven says.

‘‘The principle is that you should not be publicly funding a private benefit. But you do need to evaluate whether there is also a public benefit, through beach access and so on, then you need