Author: Alex

Climate change is happening and our stormwater and wastewater systems are particularly vulnerable. This webinar with Professor Iain White follows on from the release in October 2017 of the Deep South Challenge report into climate change, stormwater and wastewater systems.

The recent Edgecumbe floods saw raw sewage floating through the streets, making the clean-up extremely challenging. Over 300 homes in the district were damaged and six months later, 240 houses are still unliveable. Flood-proofing the town itself remains a distant goal.

The asset value of stormwater and wastewater assets in New Zealand is well over $20 billion. This includes 24,000 kilometres of public wastewater networks with more than 3,000 pumping stations, and over 17,000 kilometres of stormwater networks. Much of it, however, was not designed for the challenges climate change will bring, from sea level rise to the predicted changes in precipitation frequency and intensity.

This session will discuss the problems of decision making in an era of uncertainty, and will outline our current knowledge and the priority areas of research needed to prepare our stormwater and wastewater systems for a changing climate.

This webinar is being hosted by The Sustainability Society (TSS), a Technical Interest Group of Engineering NZ, which fosters dialogue and action on sustainability through workshops, forums, advocacy and collaborative projects.

This webinar is part of a series of webinars being co-hosted by The Sustainability Society and The Coastal Society focussed on aspects of Climate Change Adaptation. Take a look at the other sessions on offer here: https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/o/the-sustainability-society-10927824027

The recent Edgecumbe floods saw raw sewage floating through the streets, making the clean-up extremely challenging. Over 300 homes in the district were damaged and six months later, 240 houses are still unliveable. Flood-proofing the town itself remains a distant goal.

The asset value of stormwater and wastewater assets in New Zealand is well over $20 billion. This includes 24,000 kilometres of public wastewater networks with more than 3,000 pumping stations, and over 17,000 kilometres of stormwater networks. Much of it, however, was not designed for the challenges climate change will bring, from sea level rise to the predicted changes in precipitation frequency and intensity.

“The way climate change is predicted to affect our stormwater and wastewater will have a considerable impact on many aspects of NZ life, including health, disaster resilience, drinking water, ecology, and transport, not to mention how flooding or infrastructure failure will impact on communities,” said Professor Iain White, Professor at Waikato University and a co-author of the Deep South National Science Challenge report Climate Change and Stormwater and Wastewater Systems (link below).

Earlier this year, the Deep South National Science Challenge Impacts and Implications Programme brought experts together to discuss the challenges and concerns for the sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. Participants ranged from academics and scientists to business people, government policy analysts, water service providers and consultants.

This discussion resulted in the report, designed to outline current knowledge and the priority areas of research needed to prepare our stormwater and wastewater systems for a changing climate.

“For example, in many local water systems, roads are designed to be used as a secondary stormwater routes in extreme flooding. This is fine in most situations, but in extreme inundation events wastewater containing sewage may mix with the stormwater overflows, which of course brings problems such as we saw in Edgecumbe,” said Professor White.

The increase in extreme rainfall events will also add stress to the system by overwhelming the networks, restricting opportunities for maintenance, and increasing the occurrence of infiltration of wastewater into stormwater.

“We already know that sea level rise will affect all coastal infrastructure, and as many of our water networks use gravity to discharge to water bodies, the most costly areas of the network are often located in low-lying areas or on the coast. From this, increasing sewage overflows, pipes corroded by salt water, and exposure to liquefaction are all more likely,” said Professor White.

An increase in the number and frequency of coastal storms will also affect coastal infrastructure in particular, causing increasing inundation, physical damage, and electrical failure at treatment plants.

“It’s not just too much water, though,” said Professor White. “Drought brings its own problems, disrupting gravity systems by slowing flow and leading to blocked pipes. Particularly lengthy droughts can also affect wastewater treatment processes, creating functional and safety concerns.”

A priority for the Deep South National Science Challenge is to do further research in this space to better understand the risks, including cascading indirect effects where failure in one part of the system will have significant impacts elsewhere – many of which we may not yet be aware of. Professor White is also keen for Aotearoa New Zealand to incorporate these aspects within its decision-making frameworks.

“Once we have this knowledge we need to consider the most appropriate adaptation response and which practical solutions may help reduce these impacts,” said Professor White. “Filling these research gaps will help Aotearoa New Zealand reduce future disruption and cost by adapting to the forthcoming climate.”

The Climate Change and Stormwater and Wastewater Systems report (link below), commissioned by the Deep South National Science Challenge, highlights infrastructure issues Aotearoa New Zealand may face as it grapples with “increasingly severe risks” of extreme rainfall, storm surges, sea level rise and drought. 

All over New Zealand, from Haumoana to Westport, from Edgecumbe to the Kāpiti Coast, from Dunedin to Wellington City, homeowners and businesses are starting to feel the financial effects of climate change.

After the recent Edgecumbe flood, for example, Tower Insurance stated that while there had been no blanket increase for insurance costs in Edgecumbe, some prices were going up: “On average, due to higher reinsurance costs and the increased risk, customers in the region could expect prices to increase by around 15 to 30 percent, with customers in areas of significant risk sometimes experiencing larger increases,” a spokesperson said in this Radio New Zealand report.

So are insurance companies taking more notice of climate change risk than homeowners themselves, or than local or central government? And who should pay for the damage caused by climate-related disasters, or for the incremental costs our changing climate is starting to rack up?

Three new projects in the Deep South National Science Challenge  address this question and others raised by insurance experts, social and economic policy researchers and climate scientists – who came together earlier this year in a dialogue process facilitated by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust and supported by the Deep South Challenge. Together, these projects investigate the legal, economic and ethical dimensions of who should pay for damage caused by climate change events.

Legal liability, insurance and the risks of climate change

Coastal hazards are escalating with climate change. In particular, coastal homeowners can expect sea level rise and more frequent and intense coastal storms to affect their properties. Catherine Iorns, from the Law Faculty at Victoria University of Wellington, is investigating some of the legal questions surrounding sea level rise and insurance. Her project looks into the “tipping points” at which insurance companies might decide to refuse insurance to coastal property owners, and asks, what happens next? To what extent can or should homeowners rely on the Earthquake Commission (EQC) , or on local or central government, to compensate them if their homes become uninsurable, or uninhabitable, due to sea level rise, or because of associated climate risks like storm surges or coastal erosion?

Iorns’ project looks at one of the key trends in international climate litigation: trying to establish who is liable for taking (or not taking) adaptation measures.

The economic implications of insurance retreat

Despite the risks of sea level rise, coastal erosion and powerful storm surges, we’re continuing to see demand for coastal housing increase, as well as new and intensified development of existing urban coastal areas. Belinda Storey, Managing Director of Climate Sigma, who is undertaking a PhD in economics at Victoria University of Wellington, is investigating insurance retreat, through an economic lens. Escalating coastal hazards don’t seem to be reflected in home-owners’ decisions to purchase and renovate coastal property, and further, climate risk is likely not currently incorporated into the price of residential coastal property.  Evidence from overseas suggests that high insurance premiums and the unavailability of insurance has a stronger impact on private decision making than the uncertain risk of extreme events. Storey’s project therefore explores how coastal housing markets impacted by climate change might respond to “insurance retreat” – if insurance becomes unavailable. Her project will identify the locations around New Zealand most likely to lose access to insurance within the next few decades, as the likelihood of extreme events increases. 

The ethics of sharing risk

A third project being run by Elisabeth Ellis from the University of Otago addresses a key question that emerged from that dialogue between insurance companies and researchers: On a principled level, how should the risks of sea level rise be distributed between individuals, insurance, local and central government? Should we choose to view responsibility as individual or collective? And either way, which approach delivers the best and fairest outcomes? Ellis’s project will also look international literature on the ethics of risk distribution while highlighting New Zealand’s unique history and institutions.

Extreme weather, climate change & the EQC

One other (existing) project of the Deep South Challenge, being run out of Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust, by David Fleming, looks at the role of the EQC in paying for climate-related events and in fostering recovery post climate-related disasters. Although the EQC mainly helps households suffering earthquake damage, homeowners impacted by extreme weather like storms, floods or landslips can also make EQC claims for some damages. (For floods and storms, for example, the EQC will only cover the cleanup of debris and mud from the land below a house; it won’t cover damage to the house or its contents.) More frequent and more intense weather can therefore affect the EQC’s long-term sustainability. Over the last 20 years, the EQC has paid out over $240 million, on more than 17,000 claims, to households affected by non-earthquake disasters. Fleming’s project will study these claims, along with data from Statistics NZ, GNS and NIWA, to better understand how the EQC has covered households over time and across regions after extreme weather events; whether insurance pay-outs have supported households and communities to recover economically; and what the EQC’s financial liabilities might be into the future, given climate change projections about extreme weather.

Together, these projects represent a new and innovative direction for climate adaptation research in New Zealand. The Deep South Challenge is conducting research that responds directly to the needs of “the public” (represented by a range of professions and organisations), in order to better prepare New Zealand to deal with the risks of climate change and to begin to make changes now, while there’s still time for reasonable discussion and debate.

Susan Livengood is the Partnerships Director of the Deep South Challenge, and works within the Engagement programme – which tries to connect what’s happening in every programme of the challenge with both the broader public and with targeted individuals and organisations throughout New Zealand’s public and private sectors.

Susan is responsible for building and maintaining one-on-one relationships that will ultimately enable decision makers to factor climate change into their planning and decision making.

If you ask Susan what she does all day, she’ll humbly tell you that she drinks a lot of coffee with a lot of people. But, in fact, over the past year, Susan has been building a comprehensive network – people with passion and clout, who can and will help New Zealand adapt to a changing climate.

It seems unusual that a predominantly “science” organisation – the Deep South Challenge – places so much emphasis on two-way engagement with stakeholders and end users that it funds a specific role to build these relationships. But, in fact, one of the primary aims of all the National Science Challenges is to connect science with society, to gain real traction on some of the most pressing (and most intractable) issues of our time – issues like climate change.

To get a better sense of what Susan does, and how the relationships she helps build benefit both our challenge and, hopefully, our “end users” (those we hope will “use” the research we “produce”), it might be helpful to look at her work through the lens of a specific issue – New Zealand’s water infrastructure, for example. For while it’s oxymoronic to note the importance of water for a well-functioning society, water infrastructure is also something most New Zealanders tend not to think very much about.

In the main, water infrastructure is out of sight – quite literally buried – and is therefore sometimes taken for granted. Yet a lot of that existing infrastructure was built last century, and it’s not entirely clear how it will cope with the “new normal” – sea level rise, for example, or flooding due to extreme weather events.

“Water in New Zealand is really interesting,” says Susan. “There’s not the same central government oversight of water, as there is for example in the primary industries, where MPI works with agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, etc.” In general, local government develops and maintains water infrastructure, and they also have the statutory responsibility to plan for climate change, under the Resource Management Act.

“But we’re a small team,” continues Susan, “so we need to work through industry associations, rather than going, for example, straight to the water engineer at Hauraki District Council.” In the case of water, one key body is the not-for-profit Water New Zealand, “the principal voice for the water sector, focusing on the sustainable management and promotion of the water environment and encompassing the three waters: drinking water, waste and storm water” (WaterNZ website).

“We’ve worked a lot with Water New Zealand,” Susan says, and outlines her initial meetings where she introduced the work of the Deep South Challenge and the broader climate impacts likely to affect water infrastructure. “In these initial bilateral meetings, our aims are four-fold,” she explains. “We provide information on our challenge, so they’re aware of us and know that our research is happening. We try to gauge their motivation – whether they’re factoring climate change into decisions, and if so, what information they’re using, and what information they still need. (We will then feed these needs into our research programme, rather than providing a report which tells them what we think they need to know.) Our third aim is collaboration: we’re looking for future channels through which we can disseminate our science… newsletters, emails, conferences, workshops, the more interactive the better. Finally, we’re sensitive to their level of interest: do they actually want to work with us?” In the case of Water New Zealand, they were very interested, and had already established that climate change posed a risk to the sector and needed to be better understood.

“Next, we contributed scientific expertise on climate change to their water modelling symposium. The Deep South Challenge enabled hydrologist Daniel Collins (NIWA) and Mike Williams, the director of the challenge, to attend the modelling symposium and engage directly with practitioners and their most pressing questions around how our future climate might interact with water management. This was the first time that climate change had been put on the agenda at the modelling symposium.

Susan explains that the inclusion of climate change into the symposium reflects growing interest in the sector. In part, she suggests, this might be because of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s reports on sea level rise, and in part it might be because this year and last we’ve had so many floods, and in some cases, our infrastructure has not coped well.

“In heavy rainfall, apart from generalised flooding, storm water can overflow into the waste water network, which can overload the system so you can have sewage spilling out into the streets. In the case of sea level rise, saltwater could block storm water outlets, causing water to back up.  There may also be increased pumping may be required, which would have a further impact on cost.”

But while there’s growing awareness that climate change will have a huge impact on water infrastructure, there’s much less certainty about the exact nature of the impact or when it will come. To help address this gap, the Deep South Challenge Impacts and Implications Programme framed a “Deep South Dialogue” – a meeting of industry professionals, scientists and researchers that teased out the most important issues and framed them as research questions. Researchers will now be invited to carry out work on these very questions.

The “Storm water & Wastewater Infrastructure Dialogue” was held over two all-day meetings in May/June of this year, and the dialogue discussion document is due out at the end of this month. Participants in the dialogue included people from Water NZ, the Ministry for the Environment, industry, councils, a couple of NIWA scientists, and environmental and consultants like Tonkin + Taylor.

Once the report is released, and having done the spade work (establishing the relationships with key end users), Susan will go back again and brief the organisations involved and also those who weren’t involved. “In this case, we’ll brief organisations such as Local Government New Zealand, the Ministry for the Environment, Treasury, IPENZ (Engineers NZ), Infrastructure NZ, the New Zealand Planning Institute, the Society of Local Government Managers, and the Insurance Council, as insurance companies deal with the implications of storm water flooding people’s homes.”

The research that happens as a direct result of Susan’s relationship building and the Deep South Dialogues, will fill gaps in both the physical and social sciences, investigating the environmental, economic, cultural or legal impacts and implications of our changing climate on the water sector.

“Finally,” Susan says, “as the research itself gets done, it will be a matter of staying in touch with our end users, sharing our early results, and again once the research is complete, through more meetings, briefings, press releases, etc. It’s a matter of having useful information to feed relationships and also putting people in touch with others who are working on similar issues in different parts of New Zealand.”

It’s a resource intensive process, but one that Susan finds rewarding. “What’s really cool is you’re creating a community of clever people who are interested, and you’re helping to grow their knowledge around climate impacts. We’re responding to previous research that found that, in the case of climate change, ‘siloed’ decision making has been a big problem. So we’re trying to break down barriers. We’re also working at a fairly high level, because research has also found that there’s a lack of leadership in both the public and private sectors on climate change impacts, implications and adaptation.”

To foster such leadership, Susan also acknowledges that there needs to be a louder public conversation about the significance of climate change for ordinary New Zealanders. She relates a meeting with a local government representative who described the difficulty of having local conversations with communities about coastal impacts when a similar conversation was not happening nationally.

“Finally,” Susan adds, “the technical director of Water New Zealand, Noel Roberts, is also on our Representative User Group, a body which helps guide the overall strategy of the Deep South Challenge. “In this way,” Susan says, “end users have many opportunities to influence the direction of the challenge. Once you have the relationships,” she continues, “all sorts of things can happen.”

To give the last work on this particular relationship to Water New Zealand, Noel Roberts himself says: 

“It’s a challenge connecting the science and research with industry knowledge and requirements. Often the two areas of expertise don’t overlap and as such there are lost opportunities that would greater benefit the tax and rate payers who are ultimately funding these issues. When it comes to research and innovation, 1+1 can equal 3, and no single sector has the monopoly on bright ideas. The engagement programme and dialogue sessions for the Deep South Challenge is one of the few exceptions and it’s refreshing to have CRIs, Universities and the industry in sync and working towards a common problem. This could well be a model to adopt for future New Zealand challenges and issues.”

Q: Last winter saw the first decrease in sea ice extent in nearly 40 years (since satellite measurements began). When the epic 5,800 km2 iceberg broke off the Larsen C iceshelf, it was one of the most dramatic events of our Southern winter. Antarctica itself is “beginning to turn green” – with moss banks proliferating across the north of the continent. How do you, as an Antarctic sea ice researcher, integrate all this information and still keep your cool?

A: Just a clarification – last year wasn’t the first time that Antarctic sea ice extent decreased in a year-on-year sense. But it appears to have been a dramatic switch away from the slight increasing trend that the satellites have recorded for almost 40 years. (Note, I’m continuing to watch the validity of this claim as the new monthly data on sea ice extent come in) But… to answer the question! I don’t see it as my job to save the planet. So, while I see incredible changes happening at an unprecedented pace, I see my responsibility as a scientist as:

1. Taking notice, finding out, identifying and sharing information about the changes that we as a community see happening;
2. Collecting data, integrating and collaborating with colleagues, and doing a lot of deep and informed thinking to try to understand what the dominant processes are; how those processes interact and feedback into each other; what the driving forces behind those processes are; how they are likely to change when background, inter-annual and/or climate conditions change; and what downstream effect that might have.
3. Communicating my thoughts and findings to appropriate audiences – effectively giving them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions. This means different things to different audiences, so it’s always a challenge.

So, yes, while I literally lie awake at night fretting about the state of the planet, and the heritage we are leaving for the next generation, keeping my corner clean and getting on with doing my job with excellence is enough to satisfy me (for now!)

Q: How does understanding sea ice contribute to our knowledge about what’s happening more broadly in Antarctica? How closely is your team (partly funded by the Deep South Challenge) collaborating with other sea ice researchers (either from NZ or internationally)?

A: Sea ice is a complicated beast… The satellites observe sea ice from space as ‘white stuff’ in a sea of black. What I mean is that if you’re far enough away, the distinctive characters of different types or styles of sea ice formation get lost, and it comes down to a measure of how much of the surface is black, how much is white, and a consequential spatial concentration from which area and extent are calculated.

However, working right at the ice surface, we know that this thing called ‘sea ice’ that the satellites see as an amorphous white blanket, is the result of a whole mix of different formation processes. This means there are potentially big variations in thickness, floe size, topography, profile, rigidity/flexibility, strength. internal structure etc. – even within a relatively small region (e.g. Terra Nova Bay). And every time you change even one of those aspects, there’s an impact on how the ice physically interacts with the ocean; what sort of habitat the ice provides for the local ecosystem; how heat, salt, momentum and nutrients are exchanged with the ocean; how long the ice might take to melt away (thus exposing dark, liquid ocean in place of bright ice and snow); and the reflection of heat and light back into the atmosphere. Hence, we really need to develop a flexible idea of what sea ice is in terms of predicting how it (and the environment it exists in) might evolve, develop or change over timescales from hours and days to seasons, years and decades.

The type of sea ice we observe can provide us with clues about the water it has formed from, and the journey that water has been on. Sea ice is a highly dynamic and responsive entity, effectively integrating the history of what it has been exposed to over the previous winter (or longer in some cases). This means that by paying enough attention to its composition, and how that changes year to year, it is possible to contribute to a picture of all aspects of the local/regional environment, beyond the ice itself.

Field work in and around Antarctica is difficult, expensive, and often limited by tight seasonal timelines. Therefore, aligning people and projects that occupy the same physical or academic space but which have distinct scientific objectives represents a significant opportunity for efficiency gains. For example, this coming season, my team and I will share our time between our Deep South Challenge project and a Marsden-funded project. The two projects will benefit from use of the same infrastructure and scientific instruments provided by NIWA, logistical support from Antarctica New Zealand, and collaborations with international colleagues. The same model is applied to Antarctic science more generally with a much freer sharing of ideas, data and time than can exist in other sectors.

Q: The Deep South Challenge is trying to “close the loop” – we’re trying to make sure decision makers on dry land in Aotearoa can use our science to begin adapting to our changing climate. Do you feel like you’re part of that loop? If there was one thing you’d like a decision maker to understand about Antarctic sea ice, what would it be? If there’s one thing you’d want to understand about climate policy creation or decision making, what would it be?

A: Sea ice is the biggest annual change on the surface of the planet. It plays huge roles in:

1. Diving ocean flow, including ventilating the deep ocean and delivering heat around the globe
2. Influencing atmospheric circulation, including the position and intensity of the storm tracks
3. Protecting and supporting the vast and prolific southern ocean ecosystem.

It is the engine of the climate system – the Earth’s regular pulse that both responds to, and drives, large-scale climate variation. Its influence stretches into the daily lives of every citizen on the planet – even though many will never think about it and the vast majority will never experience it first-hand. And this steady beat may be starting to falter. It has certainly been trending in a direction that our state-of-the-art climate simulators have failed to capture or explain, and its recent year-on-year behaviour has become more erratic.

For these reasons, as someone who is immersed in the physical science of sea ice, I feel I ought to be part of the conversation. But with so many stakeholders at one end, and so few observational scientists at the other, a lot depends on the link the Earth System Model is intended to provide. It remains to be seen whether the ESM can facilitate the dialogue between the lives of New Zealanders and the complex, frozen system at the bottom of the world, which, for the most part, goes unseen and unnoticed.

Kia ora! Sticking with one thing throughout my career has arguably been a bit of a problem for me but conversely I think this has actually stood me in good stead for my current job; for reasons I hope to explain.

I work at The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand and my role is to develop, document, version control, etc, etc, the New Zealand Earth System Model or NZESM. Now I can already hear some of you shouting that New Zealand doesn’t have a big enough climate science community to develop an Earth System Model on its own and you’d be right. The NZESM is being developed alongside the UKESM (its UK parent model) with the aim of growing its own legs in the future. This is detailed in a lot more detail in our recent paper in Weather and Climate (see figure). This paradigm of several models using similar (if not identical) components is common nowadays; the UKESM and NZESM for example use the NEMO ocean model which is also used by other climate modelling groups in Europe. This need is well explained by the developers of the Norwegian Earth System Model, NorESM:  

“Despite the nationally coordinated effort, Norway has insufficient expertise and manpower to develop, test, verify and maintain a complete Earth System Model. For this reason, NorESM is based on the Community Climate System Model version 4 operated at the National Center for Atmospheric Research on behalf of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM)/Community Earth System Model (CESM) project of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.”

Anyway, what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that in a small research environment one has to be flexible and, in some ways, a Jack of all trades (I won’t finish the phrase but you get the idea).

This figure show the climate research landscape in New Zealand noting the contribution of the Deep South Science Challenge which funds the NZESM.

I started off my education when I left school as an accidental physicist. I was better at music and languages but I decided that I could do these later on or in my spare time to a half decent standard whereas physics… not so much. To be honest I began totally hating my compulsory C++ computing classes but after two years of realising that computers can be useful I decided to take a third year option in computational physics and even opted to do my Masters project in the simulation of electrical transport in disordered, soft matter semiconductors, i.e. solar (photovoltaic) cells and light emitting diodes.

After this I was working as a postdoc at the UK Defence Academy and came across a job doing climate model development at the Met Office. I’d heard from somewhere that they didn’t just employ specially trained meteorologists although at this point I didn’t quite believe it. I got an interview and got the job. I spent the next two years working in climate model development and evaluation with a particular emphasis on clouds and radiation. The training I received was first class and I now very much consider myself a meteorologist and a physicist. This was undoubtedly a hugely formative experience for me; lifting me hook, line and sinker out of my comfort zone and really enjoying the challenge.

After those two years I jumped ship into environmental consultancy. This new job could hardly have been more different to the last and I again had to learn quickly but this time about waste management, planning law and the environmental impacts of recycling and reuse and so on. It was a challenging role that’s for sure but at this point I started to realise that perhaps I wasn’t cut out to do the same thing all the time and that this wasn’t a bad thing.

My next foray into the relative unknown led me into paleoclimate research working as an industrially sponsored postdoc at Bristol University. This was a role which in some ways was very similar to my role at The Met Office but in other ways super different. Similarities included the fundamental philosophy of model development and the evaluation of these models against available observations and reanalyses. However, since most of the models that I was helping to develop were designed to be used on ‘deep time’ continental configurations, i.e. well over 100 million years ago, one also has to consider ‘proxies’ for validation. This becomes obvious when you consider that the dinosaurs didn’t have thermometers and barometers to measure the weather and therefore we have to rely on proxy measures such as temperature-dependent isotope ratios and geographical distributions of animals and plants with modern day analogues. Much of our model development took place on modern day configurations of our model however to enable calibration to known climate states with good observational coverage.

Round about the time that my postdoc was coming to its natural end, with the natural crazed paper and proposal writing, I came across a job advert for an Earth System modelling position in New Zealand. My boyfriend and I had discussed working abroad at some point in our lives and it seemed like a fun thing to at least have a go at applying for. After a good 6 months of applying, interviewing, serving 3 months’ notice, sorting visas and travelling for 35 hours I arrived in Wellington in December 2015.My job here at NIWA is highly varied and challenging but hugely rewarding when things work! We have a growing team of users of the nascent NZESM across New Zealand and it’s part of my role to support individual users’ research needs whilst making sure that we are both keeping apace with developments from the Met Office led Unified Model (UM) consortium and contributing our own scientific advances back in the other direction.

This figure shows the location of the UM consortium partners (from http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/collaboration/um-partnership).

More information on the Met Office Unified Model can be found here http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/modelling-systems/unified-model .

If I had to say what is the one thing that makes my life as a developer here easier, it is definitely the use of web based code repositories. We make use of two main types in our work; the Git-based GitHub for technical infrastructure (e.g. Rose, FCM and Cylc) and the Apache Subversion-based Met Office Science Repository Service (MOSRS) and NEMO ocean model repository in Paris.

The beauty of a code store like this is that it makes collaboration a doddle and, when used properly, simplifies the management, development and version control of whatever code is being tracked. Indeed it is not only ‘science’ code which we track in this way but also support and upgrade ticketing, project management timelines and wiki pages, all version controlled and available instantly to all registered users worldwide.

A concrete example of how the New Zealand community has been using this collaborative capability and contributing to model development is in the atmospheric chemistry code. A few years ago, advances were made here but at the time there was no practical way of communicating these changes back into the trunk (the central master branch if you will) of the Unified Model code. Now that MOSRS is available to us, our researchers have been able to make a branch to the UM trunk which can be trivially included in development suites by any user with access to the repository and eventually committed into the UM trunk for all to use.

A further example of the utility of the service concerns site portability of code configurations. This is very important when one considers that the same suites of code need to be run by research groups which are not only geographically spread but also use different HPC architectures. The global atmosphere research which happens in the UM consortium advances in documented in integer steps and the most recently documented version is GA6 (http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/1487/2017/). One of my first tasks in my current role was to port the next version, GA7, to our IBM Power6 HPC from a configuration which was originally designed to run on a Cray XC40 machine. It’s beyond the scope of this post to give all the gory technical details of this but in short it was necessary to change compilers, job submission methods, boundary condition file locations and so forth. By doing this we are able to provide diversity to the results of the GA7 configuration by e.g. comparing compiler versions as well as improve our own national capability in climate research by providing boundary lateral boundary conditions to downscaled regional climate modelling studies over the New Zealand region. An example of previous regional climate research output can be seen in this figure (from https://www.niwa.co.nz/climate/research-projects/regional-modelling-of-new-zealand-climate).

Since moving to New Zealand the ability to work remotely has gone from being a convenience once in a while if I needed to work at home to let a plumber in or something to being an everyday essential part of my workflow. Pretty much all of my work now relies on site-, device-, and operating system-independence. Even for the example of writing this blog post I have already used two devices in two locations and will very likely use at least one more of each before I’m done. As well as these ‘expected’ benefits, next week I will also be able to video conference in to the Met Office for the annual UM users’ workshop. I had planned to be there in person but my health had other plans! There is the slight disadvantage of being in a wildly different time zone but that’s something which is not going to change.

New Zealand has considerable expertise in atmospheric chemistry and high latitude climate processes and so it is fitting that we have been tasked with contributing to CMIP6 simulations by providing ozone boundary conditions to other members of the UM consortium. Therefore although we are a small community here we do not feel isolated from the rest of the consortium and indeed contribute a diversity of knowledge and skills whilst building national capability here in the South Pacific. This capability is crucial to the work of the Deep South National Science Challenge which funds the NZESM model development. This Challenge also funds process- and observation-based research into the Southern Ocean and Antarctic regions, the impacts and implications of climate change on New Zealanders (and in particular the Māori community through the Challenge’s Vision Mātauranga programme) as well as a wide-ranging engagement remit.

Now I thought it might be useful to others to share some of the other things that I have learnt in my current job which I have found useful and which I hope may prove useful to others also.

Jupyter notebooks

These are a way of displaying code, comments, markup text and figures within a webpage in a standard internet browser. Not only does this make for easier development (I find it a lot easier to see what I’m doing all in one place personally) it also means that the notebooks themselves can be shared as single files containing as much information as you want, including figures, so that the person you’re sending it to doesn’t have to rerun the code or deal with multiple attachments. I personally use Python as my coding language in Jupyter notebooks but you can also use other languages too, such as R and Ruby. This example figure comes from the Project Jupyter webpage, www.jupyter.org.  

Hacky Hours

At the annual New Zealand eResearch conference in 2016 (http://www.eresearchnzconference.org.nz)  I first came across the idea of Hacky Hours. These normally consist of one hour a week where people can get together to (very) informally discuss anything that they want regarding their work on or with computers. This figure shows an example whiteboard at the end of one of these sessions!

Sometimes I have been the only one able to attend and I’ve simply gotten on with my normal work with a change of scene (highly recommended!) but most of the time there are about 5 of us. We’ve had presentations on the R language, baffled ourselves with TED talks on statistics, had a live demonstration of cloud computing servers, learnt about quantum computing and seen first hand how useful Git and GitHub can be when collaborating on a coding project. All in all I would really recommend you give Hacky Hours a go; they involve essentially no planning and have proven to be very useful here at NIWA.

Twitter

I joined Twitter (www.twitter.com/jonnyhtw) in November 2014 and it has been a very positive experience for me. As well as keeping informed about all kinds of environmental issues (and a lot else in between!), as a direct result of Twitter I have been involved with an online mission to try and end the use of the ubiquitous rainbow colour scale in climate science, partly motivated by my own fairly rare form of colour blindness. This mission has the hashtag #endrainbow and has even resulted in a short Communication in Nature. This figure is from https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/808645275082489856 relating to a previous Climate Lab Book post, http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2014/end-of-the-rainbow/.

In addition to #endrainbow, I should also mention that the post you are reading right now is a direct result of interactions via Twitter.

Software carpentry and ResBaz

I was lucky enough to attend the Research Bazaar, or ResBaz, at Victoria University of Wellington in 2016. info on the global 2017 ResBaz can be found here https://2017.resbaz.com and a photograph of mine from the event can be seen on the left). In the words of the ResBaz website (I couldn’t say it better myself) ‘The Research Bazaar is a worldwide festival promoting the digital literacy emerging at the center of modern research.’ This was a great opportunity to get involved with eResearch in my new home city but away from my normal 9-5.  One thing that I definitely didn’t expect to get involved with was constructing a small website on Wellington author Katherine Mansfield http://jonnyhtw.weebly.com/resbaz-2016.html as part of the ‘Data Olympics’! This ResBaz was also the first time I had come into direct contact with a course teaching Software Carpentry, which is a global movement teaching digital skills to researchers (https://software-carpentry.org). I really wish that I had had the opportunity to attend one of these courses when I started my PhD and would encourage others to attend if they are able! Excitingly I hope to be helping out as one of the teaching assistants in my first Software Carpentry course soon.

Summary

In summary, my work as an Earth System model developer is enabled by collaborative, mainly open source, cloud based tools, without which my work would be essentially impossible. I am forever striving to make things even more portable, flexible and user friendly for myself and for other climate and Earth System modellers in New Zealand. In my opinion this makes things easier for everyone and increases transparency, traceability and safety (e.g. through automated version control).

I also hope that I’ve convinced you that having a non-standard career path can work out OK. Early career scientists nowadays are under huge pressure to publish in high-impact journals, write successful proposals, have their career planned down to the Nth degree by the time they’re 21 and generally be superhuman. My advice would be to never work in isolation, ask for help and use open source and version control tools wherever possible. Thinking about it, all three of those suggestions are basically different facets of communication. As someone much wiser than me once told me (and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember exactly who it was!): “If you don’t communicate your research to others, then you might as well not have done it!”.

I hope that this has been interesting and maybe even useful to you. Please feel free to stay in contact! I’ll leave you with a picture of our snazzy new Cray XC50 supercomputer which will be installed later this year! You can read more about it and its sibling machines here.

Haere rā, goodbye and thanks for reading!

On Monday 4 September, Minister for Science and Innovation Paul Goldsmith will open the inaugural Deep South Challenge symposium at the Wharewaka (Wellington waterfront), about how New Zealand can and must change in line with our changing climate.

The Deep South National Science Challenge, now three years old, is making its mark in the landscape of climate change research, as well as research into how New Zealanders can tackle the critical task of adapting to current and future climate change.

“Our challenge is unique among climate research programmes in New Zealand for the way it joins together physical science, predictive modelling and social science,” says Challenge Director Dr Mike Williams. “We know that scientists, industry and communities must work together if society is to adapt to our changing climate.”

Climate change poses particular challenges to New Zealand’s infrastructure (for example, our water supply or transport infrastructure); to urban, coastal and flood-prone communities; and to climate-sensitive primary industries. Decision makers (from homeowners to the private sector, to local and central government) need the best possible information about current and future climate change. Early decision-making informed by strong climate modelling can support a smoother and safer transition in the face of climate impacts such as more extreme weather, sea level rise, increased rainfall and more severe drought.

“The first of our shorter-term projects are now coming to a close,” Dr Mike Williams says. “Findings suggest we’re doing well to close the loop and support communities to begin to make the decisions that will enable them to adapt, manage risk and thrive in our changing climate.”

Climate science can be complex and challenging, and it isn’t always effectively incorporated in planning and decision making. The Deep South Challenge aims to join up the research we’re doing in Antarctica, for example, to communities of the Far North whose drinking water supply is at risk. We aim to communicate the climate simulations made by our ground-breaking New Zealand Earth System Model, for example, with decision makers weighing up the future of an airport, or a water storage scheme.

Deep South Board Member Sir Mark Solomon will also be providing a keynote speech, giving a personal perspective on climate change. “Though our climate is changing,” says Sir Mark, “in the projects of the Deep South Challenge I see a pathway forward for our children and grandchildren.”

With around 150 researchers from most New Zealand universities, three Crown Research Institutes and over 20 other organisations, it’s rare to have so many distinguished researchers in the same place, problem-solving the local and national challenges New Zealand is facing in relation to climate change.

We invite all media to attend. Please note the Wharewaka likes to know about filming/recording inside its facilities. We ask that you touch base with our Senior Communications Advisor on arrival (or, preferably, in advance).

For more details about the Deep South National Science Challenge, please visit www.deepsouthchallenge.co.nz or check out our Research Book 2017: Changing with our Climate.

Seven kaupapa Māori climate change projects – a first for New Zealand climate research – to be celebrated at inaugural Deep South Challenge symposium.

Climate change is shaping up to be a key election issue, and Māori communities are bearing the brunt of the first waves of change.

On Monday 4 September, Tā Mark Solomon will address our inaugural Deep South Challenge symposium at the Wharewaka in Pōneke, about how New Zealand can and must change in line with our changing climate. 

The symposium will also be celebrating a milestone in New Zealand climate change research. Under the Vision Mātauranga science programme of the Challenge, seven Māori-led science projects are investigating climate change impacts and opportunities for iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori business. Together they represent the largest ever Māori-led research effort into the implications of changing climate conditions for Māori society.

“These projects investigate climate change links, pressure points and adaptation strategies for Māori communities and business,” says Darren Ngaru King, Science Lead of the Vision Mātauranga Programme. “They’re also considering new products, services and systems derived from mātauranga Māori. Each project draws on distinct research methods – mātauranga Māori, science, art, design and even games – to unlock collective knowledge and shape conversations about our future climate. These projects all help to strengthen connections and knowledge exchange among Māori and the wider science community.”

Project leads include Sandy Morrison, Huhana Smith, Shaun Awatere and Wendy Henwood, all of whom will be available at the symposium to talk about their research and relationships with hapū and iwi Māori throughout the motu. It’s rare to have so many distinguished Māori researchers in the same place and each is well placed to discuss local and national challenges Māori communities are facing in relation to climate change.

A new report released by the Deep South Challenge this month recommends increasing the availability of plain-language resources about climate change in both English and te reo Māori, framing scientific information for application to practical decision making, and increasing access to climate change conversations for a wider array of end-users.

A nationwide survey

In late 2015, the Deep South Challenge (DSC) conducted a nationwide survey to get a sense of engagement activities happening in the climate change space in New Zealand. The research, commissioned by the Deep South Challenge and delivered by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, involved surveying organisations involved in a wide array of climate change communication activities.  Substantive responses were received from over 100 practitioners, in some cases in their personal rather than organisational capacity.

The DSC has used the survey results to help identify opportunities to enhance and increase climate change conversations and engagement, rather than “reinventing the wheel”. These directly informed the Deep South Challenge Engagement Strategy, approved in January 2016.

An overview of the publicly available survey results has now been published to support other organisations interested in making a contribution to the climate change engagement landscape in New Zealand [1]. This overview provides a national “snapshot” of climate change engagement at the time of the survey. We hope these findings are useful in informing the design of future climate change engagement activity in New Zealand.

The report, New Zealand’s Climate Change Engagement Landscape – August 2017 is available from Zenodo research data repository, or download the following document:

Report Findings

The survey found a broad and diverse array of organisations and individuals serving different constituencies in New Zealand and overseas, by carrying out:

• research and data collection,
• information sharing,
• education and experiential learning,
• training and certification,
• advocacy and community organising,
• public dialogue and consensus, and
• action on mitigation or adaptation.

Respondents wanted:

• more regional-scale and sectoral analysis of climate change impacts and implications;
• greater detail around climate change impacts on sea level rise, coastal zones, weather systems, the water cycle and the agriculture sector; and
• better integration of the science of climate change with the science of behaviour change.

The Deep South National Science Challenge Impacts and Implications programme has given these research areas a high priority.

Respondents also recommended that climate change engagement should:

1. Make climate change information more accessible to the public
2. Increase public receptiveness to climate change information
3. Improve public understanding of climate change information
4. Facilitate practical action on mitigation and adaptation.

These areas will be prioritised by the Deep South National Science Challenge Engagement programme (where appropriate within the scope of the Challenge). The engagement team has established work streams focused on public engagement, sector-specific engagement, capacity-building in climate change engagement, and evaluation of our engagement efforts. In addition, funding is available for external parties interested in developing initiatives that deliver on our engagement objectives.

We encourage any potential partners to email our team [email protected] to discuss ideas.

The Deep South Challenge

Climate change will impact New Zealand and New Zealanders in many ways. Good decision-making, from an individual to a national scale, requires knowledge of these expected impacts. Research supported by the Deep South Challenge will improve our understanding of climate change science and its impacts on, and implications for, New Zealand over the next 100 years. It will also enhance our ability as a country to make decisions informed by climate change research.

An essential component to responding to climate is that we understand what is happening, how to communicate it, and how we make decisions that enable our communities to adapt. There is an enormous amount of scientific evidence to say what could happen but no crystal ball to tell us when or how climate change will affect infrastructure, economies, natural resources and communities. The Challenge is therefore committed to exploring and building new channels to ensure research findings inform robust decision-making.

[1] Some respondents provided information on a confidential basis, and this has been withheld from the public report. Neither the partial nor the full data set constitutes a representative sampling of nationwide climate change engagement activity, and all of the findings are indicative rather than conclusive. In particular, for confidentiality reasons, the report does not include much of the detailed, event or organisations-specific feedback that was critical in developing the Engagement Strategy.

Expressions of interest are being sought for the role of Science Leadership Team (SLT) member for the Engagement Programme of The Deep South National Science Challenge.

The Engagement science leadership position will provide strategic guidance, oversee reporting for the Deep South Challenge workstreams and project(s) and retain oversight of communication and engagement across the Challenge including at project level. They will guide and co-manage the Challenges Director of Partnerships and Senior Communication Advisor. All programme leaders also contribute to regular SLT meetings, and proposal reviews, as required. They will also play a leading role in the development of the Future Plan for the 5 year extension of the Challenge from 2019.

Read the full Expression of Interest form here:

For more information regarding this position please contact either the existing Engagement Programme Lead, Rhian Salmon ([email protected]), or the Challenge Director Williams ([email protected]), with whom applications (CV and cover letter outlining your experience and interest in the role) should be submitted by 5pm, Monday 21 August.