The Auditor-General says councils will need to understand and commit to addressing the long-term nature of climate change impacts if they want to effectively play their part in how New Zealand adapts.
The Office of the Auditor General (OAG) released a report on Tuesday looking at the actions of Environment Canterbury, Christchurch City Council, Nelson City Council, and Whanganui District Council and how they were responding to the local impacts of climate change.
All four councils have declared a climate emergency and also represent a cross-section of size and type of local authority, according to the OAG.
Auditor-General John Ryan said that all four councils were making progress with their responses to climate change and doing so in an uncertain and evolving national policy environment.
“However, managing the impacts of climate change requires all councils to have a long-term commitment to clear climate strategies and plans, and effective governance arrangements. It also requires sustained and meaningful engagement with communities, other councils, and with central government,” he said.
The OAG report found while work to address climate change is underway, “identifying climate change as a strategic priority has not always translated into treating it as one”.
Ryan said climate strategic priorities needed to “clearly” drive council activities – and be seen to do so.
The four councils were found to be ensuring they were well informed of the potential localised impacts of climate change.
“All had climate risk information from central government organisations and had supplemented it with detailed risk assessments tailored to their local areas,” he said in the report.
All four councils were found to be making progress with their responses to climate change and doing so in an “uncertain and evolving national policy environment”.
However, Ryan said in the report that communities at risk of climate change needed to see “sustained momentum” from central and local government.
For councils, this included keeping a focus on clear climate strategies, effective governance arrangements, meaningful engagement with communities, particularly with iwi, hapū, and Māori, and robust progress monitoring.
“Maintaining community support is critical to the success of climate-related actions, and keeping the community well informed of progress is fundamental to maintaining that support,” Ryan said.
“Formal reporting on performance is also important for community engagement and is a critical part of councils’ accountability to their communities. I encourage all councils to make greater, and better, use of formal public performance reporting frameworks and measures that reflect their climate-related strategic priorities.”
13 Comments
The 3-Clown Circus won't like this
Not one little bit
(to paraphrase Mr Giesel).
Good on the Auditor - he's perhaps the last line of defense. Pity he didn't add in the feed-back-loops from the rest of the overshot Planetary Boundaries (per Rockstrom et al) - that would have really set the cat among the pigeons.
Yes they need to focus on adaptation rather than trying to be leaders in the carbon reduction race
difficult for some councillors who want to be hero's especially the Green leaning ones
and I see he is another civil servant who cant resist serving up the usual tired racial troupes
The 'green leaning' ones are closer to the truth, than the 'develop everything in sight for short-term profit' brigade.
But carrying on what we are doing, is madness. Ecological suicide.
Yes, adaption at this too-late stage trumps mitigation - but that is no excuse to keep on keeping on - that is illogical.
I said it locally. I had some concern about what it would mean when a local Council declared a 'climate emergency', and none of the information received alleviated any of the concerns. Most actions seem to be around restricting the further production of GHGs and the like. My questions were essentially how would that work to prevent climate driven events that threatened lives and property, and what could the council physically do in service to the people of the city?
The answer to the first question was NOTHING! Nothing any local council could do would prevent these events. They're driven by far bigger accumulated effects from the rest of the world outside NZ (something the Greenies don't seem to understand). What they can do is ensure current infrastructure is properly maintained, including the facilitation of draining flood waters. But more importantly communicate to the city that some areas will be at significant risk and the council cannot and will not support continued development of those areas, and would ask existing residents to consider moving away from them. Additionally the creation of additional protections would be limited to reasonable, cost effective measures only and that residents must ultimately be responsible for their own choices.
I saw no communications to this effect, so am not confident that the councils actually understand what the consequences of such a declaration means to them.
And what is their response?
They don't seem to understand that what they call for is nothing more than virtue signalling that would destroy our economy. They are not presenting the public with a plan for economic development that is sustainable and ecologically and environmentally friendly. There are opportunities here, but they don't seem to see them, instead presenting arguments that essentially amount to disinventing the wheel.
I think that it is worse than what you have highlighted here and above.
Councils make a declaration and then set out to carry out actions that support their declaration regardless of the scientific merit or otherwise of what they propose to do. Confirmation bias? or maybe just a cult?
and here on Kapiti Coast they have used worse case scenario's from IPCC (which now even IPCC recognise as implausible) to support their position with regard to sea level rise for example which of course gives the worst most expensive possible outcome
all of which is now supported by non elected but self interested members with voting rights on relevant committees
and if you complain loudly (or now even at all) you are labelled as a CC denier so your views can henceforth be dismissed as no longer relevant
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