You can blame it on climate change. You can blame it on inadequate infrastructure for the likes of wastewater. You can blame it on New Zealanders building homes, businesses and roads in the wrong places or farming in the wrong places. You can blame it on bad luck. Or you can blame it on a combination of all of the above.
Whatever you choose the reality is storms, flooding, sea surges, landslips, strong winds and fallen trees have become all too familiar to most of us in the upper North Island this summer. By my count we've had four significant storms, or adverse weather events, so far in 2023. Meanwhile looking on from the north, it appears that much of the South Island has basked in a largely hot and dry summer.
In Auckland we've experienced flooding the like of which has never been seen before. Northland and the Coromandel have taken a pounding. Tairāwhiti has copped it. Bay of Plenty and Waikato have also been hit. And on Tuesday morning we've woken up to news of significant flooding in the Hawke's Bay.
Working from home with our kids' schools shut, it feels like a Covid-19 lockdown again. But for those of us who have been fortunate in escaping the worst of the weather damage, so far at least, the lockdown déjà vu is insignificant compared to those hard hit.
When new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins took the reins last month he promised a focus on "bread and butter issues." Notably this includes cost of living issues with inflation in New Zealand, and many other countries, the highest it has been in decades. High prices for food, fuel and housing have certainly been felt by many New Zealanders against the backdrop of rising interest rates. With an election looming in October it's no surprise that Hipkins and his colleagues have zeroed in on "bread and butter issues."
I hope though that recent events will sharpen the focus on climate, or weather, resilience and raise this issue up the list of key election issues this year.
Last August the Government issued what Climate Change Minister James Shaw described as New Zealand's first national climate adaptation plan, bringing together in one place the Government’s efforts to help to build climate resilience and setting out priorities for the next six years. This move to building a "climate resilient" NZ even talks about managed retreat, moving the likes of assets, activities and sites of cultural significance away from areas of high risk.
The adaptation plan doesn't, however, feature much detail on how all this would be paid for. Shaw did, however, indicate that asset or property owners, their insurance companies, their banks, local government and central government can all expect to share the cost.
The Climate Adaptation Act is in the works as part of the Government's moves to replace the Resource Management Act.
Six months ago the development of this new Act was probably set to largely slide under the public's radar. I really hope, however, that recent events will lift it much higher on the political, media and public's agenda. Because it's really important.
Whatever reason(s) you ascribe to what's going on with our weather, we aren't well enough prepared for it. We need to have a long hard think about what we've built and where, what we want to build in the future and where, where some of us live, work, play, grow stuff and farm, and if, how and why this may need to change.
We need to have wide ranging and honest discussions and debates across our society. Our politicians need to be involved, and ideally we need as much consensus across the political divides as we can get so that key decisions survive changes of government. We don't need our media reporting the political side of this, as some like to do, as if it's a sport. We need to do better than that.
In my opinion NZ suffers from a lack of long-term planning in the way our cities and towns have grown and in the way we have, or often haven't, developed infrastructure. Working to improve our climate resilience is an important opportunity to try and reverse this. I really hope we don't drop the ball on this.
(*Also see the Of Interest podcast on climate adaptation finance with David Hall, and the podcast with Tower CEO Blair Turnbull on insurance & climate change).
71 Comments
Science has always been political.
There are things we all may agree on, but when politicians use "science" to promote their agenda then it becomes political.
Most would agree that the climate is changing - Some say its manmade, some say its not. But the need for politicians to take away rights and tax us will always result in some controversy.
Those saying climate change isn't man made are loud, but clueless and are the ones crowing about "politics". Meanwhile the actual science is apolitical and 100% clear. It's the same planet being heated by human caused greenhouse gases regardless of political persuasion :-)
And it's the same planet, full of human-altered resources - we call it infrastructure - succumbing to entropy.
Gareth get close - he needs to add in population, and the next-is-next-worst sequence, whether it be house-siting, sprawl-coverage, quality of mined material; each next is the next best, meaning worse.
But we won't learn. We will keep trying to 'rebuild' - as per the Brownlee blunders in Chch - which had greenfields potential but blew it.
Climate change is definitely happening, the argument is how much human activity is responsible and its certainly a factor.The last ice age started approx 100,000 years ago and reversed 25,000 years ago when human activity was minimal if any. The change was most likely the heat output of our sun as heat is the main driver of weather. Unless human activity is a major contributor then changes in activity will have the same level of change and that remains the argument, a more pragmatic approach until the effect of human activity is determined is to adapt to the predicted changes.
In this case, it might be to adapt to death of our civilisation as we know it. Which is an untenable position for anyone to think about in a system designed for growth growth growth. We have gone way beyond our natural resource limits, climate change is just one indicator of that, but there are flashing red signals everywhere we look.
But blaming the sun at this point and still questioning the science is pretty freaking crazy IMO. Especially because in doing so it blunts our willpower to act on it.
The answers to your questions are readily available Rumpole. Ice ages are caused by Milankovitch cycles, which change the amount and distribution of solar energy Earth receives.
Solar output changes very little over relevant time frames. "a small decrease in solar irradiance over the last 35 years would have caused a slight cooling of the climate over this time period – but only in the absence of other influences on Earth's climate." In other words humans have not only heated the planet, they have reversed a natural cooling trend.
We know how much energy the Earth receives from the sun. We know how much heat energy Earth loses to space. the difference between the two is the Earth's energy budget from which we can derive how much extra energy is being trapped in the climate system. That extra energy trapped is the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs/second and accelerating.
Weld,
Try substituting "extreme weather" for climate change. The former is objective; the latter has a strong political component.
The basic science behind global warming/climate change has no political component. Of course, political parties will seek to put their own spin on it-numerous studies have shown that Right wing voters are far more likely to reject the human element, compared to left wing voters. People tend to view this and many other things such as gun control, the death penalty etc. through the lens of their world view. In other words, they use confirmation bias to bear on these issues.
It all depends on whether the New Zealand Voters accept an significant increase in (local) government spending like towards Scandinavian- and Nordic Countries Levels as a ratio of GDP. I reckon this could be well above of 50%. The spending in 2022 as ratio of GDP was 42% according to the treasury. The increase would be around 12 Billion NZD a year until we have closed the resiliance gap.
So just a few years after the Paris Accord we are discussing a 'managed retreat' instead of accelerating our plans to save the planet.
One would think before we spend anything we should agree on the likely planet temperature increase and impact on NZ - what the country will look like in 100 years... i.e. how much of NZ might be under water, what will we eat, where will we get water, energy etc. And build accordingly. My understanding is Bill Gates and most of his wealthy mates are of the opinion we have a zero percentage chance of preventing the rate of climate damage and thus have to plan for the worst case outcome. I concur.
Likely we will abandon roads in favor of boats and drones, energy will be produced locally (to minimise impact of infrastructure damage), food locally, manufacturing more domestic, water will be scarcer and similarly resilient local solutions likely better. etc etc.
Rather than denser cities - resilient smaller cities in better protected locations and a managed migration of the community/workforce.
It would probably lead to a pretty cool place to live.
Absolutely. We should use our resources to prepare for climate change and strictly NOT in an effort to prevent it. We're too small to move the needle on any of this stuff globally, so all we achieve in attempting to reduce our emissions is a lower quality of life, increased cost of living and reduced birth rate.
Let's prepare for a bountiful future on a changing planet. More C02 doesn't have to mean the end of times. We'll adapt - humans are masters at this.
Humanity must be prioritised over the environment. This doesn't mean destroy the environment, it means master it to serve humanity. An environment without humans is pointless.
"Humanity must be prioritized over environment" ?????????
Unless the we prioritize the environment there will nowhere for humanity to live.
And as for an environment without humans being pointless. It got on pretty damned well for the greatest amount of time it had been here before we came along to destroy it.
We actually aren't special, will probably turn out to be a failed experiment by nature, possibly lasting unbelievably short for our so called 'intelligence'
What makes you think human civilisation will be a thing above 3degC, because that is exactly where we are headed by 2100? Although the heating wont stop at 2100 of course. Onwards and upwards from there. What I think is pointless, is believing humans, without an environment, is livable! Physically, or psychologically!
FFS!....
Everyone here assumes climate change caused these weather events! WRONG!!!
Google "Bola NIWA." Read the facts!
https://hwe.niwa.co.nz/event/March_1988_North_Island_Ex-tropical_Cyclon…
1988 before Globall warming, , and climate change, and ...
..WE HAD CYCLONE BOLA. It was bigger stronger wetter and windier! And...
this was before all this bullshite!
Weather bombs of the last 10,000 years were never issues of climate change! As man was not burning fossil fuels for 99% + of this time period!
climate change is a weapon used by minority groups of individuals to extract huge sums of money for power and greed.
scientists are measuring 0.000001% of the planets weather history and making rash assumptions based on poor low levels of data.
they will be proven wrong!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but physics doesn't care about your use of capital letters. Humans are heating the planet. It's actually irrefutable. Global heating doesn't cause weather events, it juices them! Bola would have had an element of human juicing. In fact all weather events since humans started geoengineering the planet with deforestation 1000s of years ago have had an element of juicing, albeit much smaller historically than currently.
Economics (old skool.. new skool) is only relevant when we are (1) alive and (2) still have some form of ordered civilisation
At present we are rushing headlong into a world of resource driven wars, climate events, pandemics and possibly an AI race.
A year ago success in nz was owning lots of investment properties or developing residential.. living on a big house on the edge of a sea facing cliff and driving a big ute.... those things are changing fast... and national cconomies and personal strategies to prosper will have to evolve or be left behind.
many local governments (and the national government? Or were they just considering it) declared 'climate emergencies' but didn't seem to understand or appreciate what that meant or what to do about it. Alongside all that it seems they spend less on building and maintaining infrastructure and spend more on the 'pretties', while pumping rates. They hire 'Xspurts', paying very good money, but then either ignore them, or the 'Xspurts' just aren't really and are wrong in their advice, and guess what? Rates have to get pumped again to pay for the mess created! Lose - lose for the rate payers!
"...how all this would be paid for."
We've actually paid for it already. New Zealand has all the Debt required to fund this initiative, but it's in the wrong place.
So how do we tease it out from the speculative part of our economy and into the productive?
The RBNZ changes the Risk-Weighted Asset Ratio for that lending that it wishes to discourage.
At a time of climate emergency our “green” party is only polling 7%. Perhaps those that prioritise cannabis and identity politics could form one party and those that prioritise the environment could start a true Green Party. Is there a leader that can take the greens back to focussing on bread and butter green issues?
The Green party of today has really become a shadow of its former self. Try bringing up population growth and you'll be shouted down as an eco fascist. If you are going to ignore the cause of biosphere collapse, I=PAT, what is the reason for this "Green" party to exist? We already have a neoliberal industrialist leftist party. I fully expect Greens to begin pushing Nuclear and Transgenics, as its transformation into techno utopianism nears its logical conclusion.
The first question to ask: Should population growth in Auckland be frozen? Should government (with incentives) encourage people to move to the regions south of Auckland where all infrastructure and housing will be cheaper to build ? That alone will probably (just a guess) save more than halve the cost of protecting NZ from climate change weather events for the next 100 years.
Careful the Jafa's will be on to you for committing blasphemy! But i suggested that point a year or so ago, that the evidence the evidence is that the Auckland area cannot support the population living there. But i don't see any evidence that the powers that be recognise this at all.
Don't be so sure. By the end of the year Aucklanders and the rest of NZ are going to be struggling with mortgage payments and inflation is not going away. On top of that house prices are dropping at 10k a month and that is set to accelerate. Just because there has been some 1 in 100 year storm in Auckland, we won't be dropping the OCR back to 1% again.
Aucklanders have years of Labour mayors to thank for the pitiful mess that is Auckland infrastructure that contributed greatly to the damage in the first event that softened the region up to get devastated in the second.
After that we have the crime disaster, the health system shambles, three waters and co-governance to focus back on if we ever get past the natural and economic disasters that we are focusing on now.
Depressing times ahead, and it's all on the government of the day. It's all their fault, and it always is.
Yep, I'm still wondering why he hasn't completed all the infrastructure and drainage improvements and performed all the deferred heavy maintenance in the first few months of his term. There is nothing he could have actually done, except tell Aucklanders about the impending doom a few hours earlier than it arrived. No point blaming the new guy that wasn't there creating this mess in the first place.
I wouldn’t point the fingers at the mayors. Rather I would point the fingers at ‘ourselves’.
The political economy of local government is all about limiting rates rises. This is the dominant concern of the majority of our population.
This has been a key factor in limiting the amount of investment in infrastructure.
I disagree, the problem is wasteful expenditure and projects that are nice to have pushing out projects that are essential to have, here is just one example - https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/127223549/auckland-transport-criticise… - $144 Million - how many Kms of drains cleaned and improved would that money have fixed.
No Gareth!
It's weather - nothing to do with climate.
Remember the Wahine disaster in the hurricane on 10 April 68? Remember the 1984 floods, the 1988 cyclone Bola...etc.
Just periodic weather events. No need to jump on a train called "fear" driven by global policital agendas that the people have not choosen, but been progandized into. It's a program of control that everyone will regret they ever allowed it to rule their lives.
What this experience suggests to me is that resilience = redundancy.
First off the rank is communications systems.
Second is local supply systems - civil defense warehousing of food/medicines/tools etc. and individual householders having alternate capability with respect to loss of reticulated services, i.e. drinking water storage and waste composting.
Third transport. I do wonder whether the amount of heavy vehicle traffic on our road network needs to be regulated down with rail and sea being the long haul standard. And I do wonder whether we have to end logging of remote pine forests unless able to be taken out by sea..
And we'd have weathered :) covid better, if we'd had reserve Health capacity - spare beds etc.
But we've been lulled to sleep by the drone of neoliberal economics - which ignores the real world and abhors capacitance, which it calls inefficient.
Well, the bulkhead-design on the Titanic was short-term efficient; saved steel, and money. Long term?
I think you are being a bit "utopian" Gareth. We can rely on our politicans of any colour, coming up with ringing phrases..."build back better", etc.. But I would suggest that while we can expect our politicians to use any major event to their own advantage (& haven't we seen so much of this with the current "lot") progress will be weighted by a myriad of small actions rather than the ''master plans' being promoted in this column.
We humans seem to learn best by putting our hand on the hot stove & perhaps we can expect, for example, home buyers being a lot more discerning about buying in valleys, river banks and cliff tops. And perhaps even our government bureaucracies might become a little less keen on piping small streams ('small' as in summer) and tar sealing everything else. Wairau Valley, (Auckland) I am looking at you!
And let's remember too, the costs of any remediation wont be met by government, central or local, but by muggings end consumer, rate & taxpayer.
Or you can blame it on a capitalist economic system that strives for unending growth to merely privilege a few at the expense of many. A system that has degraded our environment to the point that we have, destabilised the climate, add 5 atomic bombs of energy to the atmosphere per second, wiped out most of the living world, and caused numerous species and population extinctions. A system that has seen 1% of the population owning 50% of the wealth. A system where hundreds of millions are in poverty, lack access to minimal necessities to live a life of dignity and where over a 100 million are displaced by war, weather events, and economic collapse; a number set to rise dramatically over the coming decades.
Further, the same system is under control by those who benefit the most. Just look at the fossil fuel interests attending the COP's. Climate change is only a symptom, hence the increasing discourse about what to do. It provides a distraction for the root causes. Climate change will only be viewed as a problem by elites should it destabilise their control over capital, which is why they have refused to act so far - it does not pose any immediate threat. Once enough pressure is placed on them, piecemeal changes will come to simply dull the anger of the population.
The more important question is not who and what we should blame, but how is it that we ended up here?
Anyway, here is some good news, I think asb recorded record profits this morning, close to a billion, what an achievement.
Oh dear, Kir 10, at first glance I thought you must be describing the USSR in the 1920's & 30's, or the Chinese economy in the 1950's & 60's, but no, apparently the western capitalists are to blame.
Given the well known human effect of "power corrupting", a reality that has affected all manner of societies over the ages, do you have a solution? A re-read of Orwell's Animal Farm might help.
The well-known "power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a hypothesis about human behaviour. Further, if that is your reading of what I wrote then that is merely your understanding driven by your own ideological deficiencies or simply the prevailing hegemonic commonsense.
We do live in a complex globalised world and public opinion is calling for strong climate policies across western democracies, so why do we see no action? Why are we not acting in decisive ways to limit environmental damage because its wrong to degrade the planet for the benefit of a small moniroty. But first you need to view the damage wrought by several centuries of 'progress' as not inherent to a purpose society/civilisatoin and not merely an unfortunate by product of western civilizations esteemed success.
As for 'my solutions', I simply side the majority of the population who are asking those in power positions to firstly, do their job, and secondly enact policies commensurate with the scale of the problem. Unlike 'all manner of previous societies' we have a thing called democracy. Which is a institution separate from the reigning socioeconomic system. What will be will be, civilsations fall and die with regularity. However, seems like a shame and a waste to continue down the path were on.
I do think we need more democracy as a check against the power imbalances inherent on a state capitalist society.
As for animal farm, perhaps a read of the preface might help.
Good points kir 10. Given the limitations of dealing with complex issues in a few words on this excellent site, I doubt that we are very far apart in our opinions. Granted that ambitions toward continuing "growth" is a very dubious concept at this point. Granted that a small percentage of the populations of almost all nation states hasn't produced results based on "fair shares".
I would suggest that western societies might have a slightly better record in regard to these two issues compared to communist societies, but this is arguable.
But I wish you well in your thought that.."more democracy will act as a check against power imbalances inherent on a state capitalist society". In my view the democratic masses are just as keen on growth and control of wealth as our current small minority who hold the purse strings.
I am put in mind of an interview c 2008 when there were mass demonstrations against Wall Street and the 2% (was it?) who had cornered most the nation's wealth. The reporter asked a protester what he wanted. "We want our fair share" was the reply. "Oh, you mean you want to share your wealth with those in the third world?"
Of course that was not what the protester envisaged but illustrates the huge complexity of the issue. Western democracy might not be quite up to your expectations, but good luck with the idea.
H5
If not democracy, then what?
I'd rather full participatory democracy than anything else I could think of because the status quo is leading to social decay and collapse. Using a single person's answer to a question during the occupy movement is hardly a knockdown argument for worries about solving issues that require collective action.
Yes, it's extreme weather, made worse by global warming, due largely to increased atmospheric CO2, due to increasing burning of fossil fuels over the last 2 centuries.
Well said GarethVaughan. We need to prepare for plenty more extreme weather.
And to get political, we have to be thankful for our resilient communities, where people work together to support each other, and government works to support the community. I think building these sort of communities are as important as adapting and building resilient infrastructure. And to get more political, it's we asset owners who should meet most of the cost.
And of course working with other nations to stop burning fossil fuels and the resulting CO2 increase at the same time.
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