Coastal hazards report revised

The Christchurch City Council is embarking on six-month programme to revise a controversial report on flooding and erosion.

In August, a panel of scientific experts highlighted a number of aspects of the Tonkin & Taylor coastal hazards assessment report that needed to be changed or reassessed.

It wanted maps highlighting coastal erosion hazard zones discarded and redone for areas including the Avon-Heathcote Estuary and the Akaroa and Lyttelton harbours.

A staff report, due to be discussed by the Christchurch City Council last week but delayed until this week’s council meeting, said the peer review panel’s recommendations would be completed and included in a revised coastal hazards assessment report by March 2017.

The cost of completing the recommendations would be about $190,000, council natural resources principal advisor Peter Kingsbury said in the report.

The peer review cost the council $168,650.

Kingsbury said the final report would include more coastal maps than in the original report and they would present a broad range of possible scenarios.

The first Tonkin & Taylor report, released in July 2015, identified 6000 Christchurch properties that could be susceptible to erosion and nearly 18,000 at risk of coastal inundation over the next 50 to 100 years. The science behind the report was heavily criticised and the council agreed to subject the report to a second peer review.

Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports were changed to reflect the potential risk identified by the Tonkin & Taylor report and were amended again earlier this month following the peer review panel’s findings.

Kingsbury said the LIM reports would be changed again once the revised hazard assessment report was completed.

Christchurch Coastal Residents United (CCRU) has been fighting to get coastal hazard information taken off LIMs since the report was first released last year.

The group was still not happy with the latest notation and had received legal advice on it.

CCRU spokesman Darrell Latham said the council had been provided with that legal opinion and CCRU was awaiting a response.

The group did not want to publicly release the legal opinion until the council had the opportunity to respond, he said.

Once the revised assessment report was completed, the council was proposing to spend the rest of 2017 talking to the community about ‘‘adapting to coastal hazards and climate change’’.

The council then expected, in 2018, to begin a formal process to put in place new planning rules in the coastal hazard areas.

A move to make changes through the fast-tracked District Plan review process was dropped in September last year, following an announcement by Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel and Environment Minister Nick Smith.