RISING DAMP
The community most exposed to sea-level rise is also one of the poorest. National correspondent Charlie Mitchell reports in the second of a two-part series on South Dunedin’s climate change challenge.
Eleanor Doig tells a story about South Dunedin. It was the 1980s, and some of the city’s leaders saw the community as a problem.
‘‘They tried to get a library here and a city councillor turned to the person pushing for it and said, ‘do you really think they’d use a library out there?’ ’’
She sighs. ‘‘This community has been neglected for generations.’’
Doig is a community facilitator, and says the community has long fought against preconceptions about its residents.
It partly comes from traditional economic and social measures, on which South Dunedin performs poorly. On the deprivation index, a measure of socio-economic disadvantage, parts of South Dunedin score in the bottom 10 per cent nationally.
The median personal income is $20,100, but in some pockets it is as low as $14,000. The majority of people do not own the homes they live in.
Because the area is flat, many South Dunedin residents are wheelchair users, or have mobility issues. Its high density of support services draws people who have experienced mental or emotional distress. The lowquality housing stock makes it affordable for people on low incomes, or recent immigrants.
It is beneath all of this that the water rises. At its lowest points, some parts of South Dunedin are within 30cm of the water table, and much of it is within one metre. As the climate changes and the sea level rises, it’s a community at risk.
But South Dunedin is not just a list of statistics, Doig says. It is also a place with a strong sense of community, with deep historical roots and a diverse population. There are schools, and social groups, and churches; there are parks and sports teams and businesses. People from around the city come to enjoy the beach, or visit the mall, or simply to enjoy the sea wind as it blows pleasantly up the main street.
For community leaders like Doig, the water problem has become central to their work. In recent months, there have been half a dozen hui about the rising water. The latest drew upwards of 130 people.
‘‘What we’re trying to do in these hui is say we are determined that no-one sitting in Wellington, or at the city council, will make decisions without us being a part of that,’’ she says.
The rising water could provide a chance for South Dunedin to shine, to harness the endurance and ingenuity of its residents towards proactive solutions, paving the way for others to learn how to live with the effects of climate change.
‘‘As well as the threat, there’s opportunities here,’’ Doig says. ‘‘We’ve got the opportunity to do some creative, innovative urban design.
‘‘We’re arranging more and more events where people get together and grow that sense that this isn’t a hopeless case, this isn’t a terrible community, we’re a poor community but we’re survivors, and we’re a community worth working in.’’
A community exposed
A few months after a major flood in June 2015, then parliamentary commissioner for the environment Jan Wright released a report into sea-level rise.
It made particular mention of South Dunedin, and the flooding it had sustained months earlier.
It made it clear that South Dunedin was the single biggest community in New Zealand exposed to sea-level rise, at least in the medium term.
The report found about 9000 homes nationally were within
50cm of the mean high tide mark,
2700 of which were in Dunedin, more than Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch combined.
Of those 2700 houses, the majority were within 25cm of the water mark. Some houses in South Dunedin are actually below sea level, protected by the dunes at St Clair beach.
What happens in South Dunedin is nationally significant. Whatever happens there may, for better or worse, become a model for the rest of the country. And what makes the flooding at South Dunedin such a thorny problem is that it’s not just a scientific puzzle, but a social one.
‘‘There’s an archetype of South Dunedin, as people tend to see it – a low socio-economic area – but just like any other place, people love it for a range of reasons,’’ says Dr Janet Stephenson, who researches community adaptation to climate change.
The head of the Centre of Sustainability at the University of Otago says, ‘‘That sense of attachment and passion is something we have to take into account when we’re looking at climate change impacts.’’
Researchers put together an interactive map in which they could overlay social and economic data with a heightabove-sea-level map, to see if there was a correlation.
There is. The areas closest to sea level tend to score highly on the social deprivation index, meaning its residents are likely to have low incomes and to be renting their homes.
They also looked at facilities such as schools and community centres, and found 17 such places in the lowest-lying areas, as well as three rest homes.
In discussions about adapting to climate change, there’s a tendency to jump straight to managed retreat, Stephenson says. This can be particularly damaging in places that have traditionally been marginalised, and it’s something decision makers need to keep at the top of their minds.
‘‘Adaptation is, first and foremost, an issue of emotions. It is emotive to be affected, it is emotive to think about the implications for you and your daily life, for your children, for the possibilities of what you might have to deal with in the future,’’ she says.
The recent past has been littered with failures and false starts for councils that have tried to tackle these issues.
It began, most notably, with Ka¯ piti Coast District Council’s plan to put hazard warnings on many coastal homes, which ended up in a prolonged and expensive court battle.
A similar fight took place in Christchurch in 2015, when residents objected to coastal hazard maps that showed thousands of homes at risk of inundation. The maps were dropped and redrawn.
These examples have filtered down through local government, which has collectively struggled to talk about climate change in a meaningful way, Stephenson says.
South Dunedin may prove to be a new model for how councils and communities work together – sharing power and decisionmaking, and navigating the unknown together.
‘‘That sense of attachment ... is something we have to take into account when we’re looking at climate change impacts.’’