Author: Alex

The Impacts and Implications programme is funding research that will help New Zealanders manage risk, adapt and thrive in a changing climate.

Part of that funding follows a fairly traditional process, with scientists applying for money to fund research they consider valuable – that funding will be allocated by the end of this summer. However, a second part of the Impacts and Implications funding follows a more collaborative process, with scientists and stakeholders engaging in a facilitated dialogue event to identify tractable research questions that are relevant to important decisions in New Zealand society.  From this process, the Deep South Challenge will then fund research to answer those questions, ideally supported by stakeholders with either in-kind contributions or co-funding.  Wilbur Townsend outlines the year ahead.

Insurance dialogue – exploring possibilities

The first dialogue event will ask how insurance can better inform and ameliorate climate change-related risk. Our focus will be on risks for coastal property, though similar issues exist for other flood-prone and wind-prone properties.

The effects of climate change are already evident in coastal property and will do so increasingly. The existing 20cm of anthropogenic sea-level rise increased Superstorm Sandy’s storm surge losses in New York by 30%, because a small amount of sea-level rise can substantially exacerbate flooding. Under the most optimistic scenario studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average sea levels are likely to further rise by between 26cm and 55cm by 2100. Across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Napier, roughly 27900 houses are within 1.5m of the average spring tide and 5100 are within 0.5m.

Conversation around risk

One of the key social functions of insurance is to communicate risk. However home insurers’ policies last for just one year. This means that home insurance premiums reflect current risks but do not reflect future risks. In particular home owners and home buyers cannot currently use insurance premiums to assess the risk that their home will be destroyed by sea level rise. Longer terms on insurance policies would ensure that insurance policies signal future risk – if the difficult actuarial challenges of designing such policies could be resolved.

Insurance policies cover many risks but they don’t cover everything. For example, the terminally ill are unlikely to be offered a life insurance policy. Similarly, a coastal property may be too risky for an insurance firm to be willing to offer insurance. This means the property becomes un-insurable, and as a result worth little.

Insurance firms could suddenly decide that many houses are un-insurable. For example, if a bad flood in Thames convinces insurance firms that the flood risk all over New Zealand is greater than they had previously thought, home owners in Dunedin might find they cannot renew their insurance. This will impose social risks because in the event of a flood many people will be unprotected. These social risks can also impose fiscal risks on government.

Impacts on banking

Banks could also be threatened because mortgage lenders often require that mortgagees be insured. A property may become un-insurable after a mortgage has been issued; an uninsurable property won’t easily be sold because buyers can’t get a mortgage. Lack of insurance could lead to financial instability as bank assets and the housing market are affected.

By facilitating conversations between researchers, insurers, banks and government the Deep South Challenge will develop a better understanding of these phenomena and identify research that can help New Zealanders adapt to a changing climate.

For more information and contact details see the Impacts and Implications Programme page

The Engagement Strategy for the Deep South Challenge (DSC) outlines the goal and objectives of the Engagement Programme and describes background research, practical workstreams and example activities for delivery of these objectives. This strategy was approved by the DSC Board in December 2015 and further updated and approved in December 2016 to reflect greater clarity around intra-Challenge linkages.

Engagement Strategy: Executive Summary

Climate change will impact New Zealand and New Zealanders in many ways. Good decision-making, from an individual to a national scale, will require knowledge of these expected impacts. Research supported by the Deep South Challenge (DSC) 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 to make decisions informed by climate change research.

Engagement goals and objectives

The goal of the DSC Engagement programme is to contribute to improving New Zealanders’ ability and capacity to make decisions informed by DSC-related research.

This will be delivered by focusing on six engagement objectives:

1. Ensuring that DSC research responds to the needs of New Zealanders;
2. Strengthening channels with key audiences and sectors with regard to DSC-related climate change research to build sector-specific interest in, and capacity to understand and use, this information to enable more informed decision-making; 
3. Establishing broad public communication and two-way engagement about DSC-related climate change research to increase New Zealanders’ awareness of, and ability to access and use, DSC research outcomes such that they inform climate-related decisions;
4. Maintaining communication of DSC progress (to the public, key stakeholders, and funders, DSC researchers and committees);
5. Building capability for engagement about climate change among experts and intermediaries (especially related to modelling, impacts and implications, and adaptation), and contributing expertise to engagement led by external partners, to ensure effective communication and dialogue through and beyond the duration of the DSC;
6. Evaluating the DSC engagement programme to ensure that the programme delivers on its goal and contributing to academic literature through research on factors enhancing the effectiveness of climate-change engagement.

Four workstreams have been established to deliver the Engagement objectives:

Workstream 1: Tailored Engagement (Objectives 1 & 2)

Target Audience: People who can drive improvements in decision making in key climate-sensitive sectors, including finance, infrastructure and natural resources; marginalised or low-income communities; and sectors where New Zealand’s competitive advantage may be eroded.

Workstream 2: Broad public and internal Engagement (Objectives 3 & 4)

Target Audience: Members of the public who make decisions that could be influenced by an understanding about climate change research. This is a wide scale, which spans individuals who may not currently take climate into consideration in any decisions, to individuals who might use climate data to make a specific decision. (This does not include school-children as a primary target audience but does include family-focused engagement and young adults.)

Workstream 3: Capacity-building for engagement (Objective 5)

Target audience: DSC researchers and other professionals with climate information expertise; stakeholders and thought-leaders who can act as facilitators of engagement and information-sharing with key sectors; and engagement and communication professionals. 

Workstream 4: Evaluation and Research (Objective 6)

Target audience: DSC leadership, including Science Leadership Team, Independent Science Panel, and Board; DSC funders, particularly MBIE; and the international research community in public engagement with science and climate change communication. Implementation of the engagement strategy is the responsibility of the Science Lead (Engagement), in close cooperation with the Science Leadership Team (SLT), the Technical Advisory Committee for Engagement (TACE) and a Representative User Group (RUG).

Key messages

Key messages of the Deep South Challenge follow. These are aligned with each programme. The selection of these messages, and their framing, will vary for different events, activities, and audiences. Information provided in parentheses is supplementary.

• Climate change is happening
• People need reliable climate information in order to be able to make important decisions about their future [Engagement]
• The main areas of change will be related to more extreme weather events, droughts, shifts in typical weather patterns, and sea level rise [Impacts & Implications]
• Given diverse living arrangements and climate-sensitivities across Māori society, there is a growing need to know more about the specific implications (includes opportunities and risks) of a changing climate for iwi/hapū/whānau and Māori business. [Vision Matauranga]
• In order to make more accurate predictions of future climate in New Zealand, we need to develop the New Zealand Earth System Model [Earth System Modelling and Prediction]
• Research in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean is important to better understand key (high-latitude) processes (and to represent them appropriately) in the New Zealand Earth System Model [Processes and Observations]

Funding

Funding for projects and activities that deliver on the Engagement Programme Goal and Objectives is available through three channels:

• commissioned work funded directly by the Engagement Programme;
• projects proposed by external partners that are funded by the Engagement programme following an application process
• through the DSC Contestable funding process (open for projects that deliver on any or several DSC programmes, including Engagement).

Funding from the Engagement Programme can be used to support time and costs for development, coordination and reporting/evaluation of an activity.

More information on Engagement Programme funding

Welcome to Associate Professor Adrian McDonald who joined the Deep South Challenge Science Leadership Team (SLT) for the Processes and Observations Programme on 1 November.

Adrian has been involved in the Deep South Challenge since its inception and brings a broad expertise in physical climate processes, essential for overseeing the range of projects involved in the programme. Adrian continues his teaching and research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Canterbury, where his research focuses on climate processes that are important in polar regions and their influence on the Southern Hemisphere. 

Adrian was one of the first researchers to be supported in the initial steps of the Challenge, and currently leads two Challenge projects. One of these core projects is focussed on the accurate representation of Southern-Ocean clouds and aerosols in the New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM).  The other is a satellite simulator project that aims to facilitate comparisons of satellite data and model output from the NZESM via the use of software simulation tools.

Adrian’s appointment strengthens both the observational and modelling skills of the Deep South Science Leadership Team, and we look forward to hearing more about Adrian’s work in the future.

The development of a New Zealand-based Earth System Model represents a significant investment to better predict New Zealand’s climate, and therefore to make more informed decisions for the future.  We asked Dr Olaf Morgenstern, who leads both the Earth System Model and Prediction Programme and the “Capability” project within the Deep South Challenge, how the project has been developing.

What does the Capability project involve?

The Capability project is about coordinating, supporting, maintaining, and to some extent operating the New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM). As such, it occupies a central role in the Earth System Modelling & Prediction (ESMP) programme of the Deep South National Science Challenge. Thus far, the project has focussed on two roles:

The first is to bring in, install, and test versions of the Hadley Centre Global Environment Model (HadGEM) which the NZESM will be based on.

The other role is to support users. In the future, as the other, more scientifically oriented projects gain momentum, the project will also coordinate code contributions from these projects.

What will this enable us in New Zealand to do that we can’t do now?

In the future we will have an Earth System Model of our own which we will use to produce simulations of past, present, and future climate. We have never had such a capability before and have had to rely solely on international modelling efforts for global climate projections. These are subject to some well-documented weaknesses, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. A desire to get involved in model development to tackle these deficiencies, tapping into local expertise in high-latitude (i.e. Southern-Ocean and Antarctic) climate physics, was a motivating factor for the New Zealand Government to give the Deep South Challenge the remit that it now has.

You’ve been overseas to meet with international counterparts and collaborators – how will we work with them in the future?

Our lead overseas partner is the UK Met Office. The Met Office is a world-leading climate modelling centre, having contributed to all five Assessment Reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990. NIWA has an established relationship with the Met Office, having used their weather and climate models since the 1990s. Hence the Deep South Challenge decided to base the NZESM on the UK Earth System Model (UKESM). Development of this model is now shared between the Met Office and several partners, including the Deep South Challenge. Jonny Williams, Olaf Morgenstern, and Vidya Varma visited the Met Office in November 2015 and April 2016, to meet with Met Office colleagues and learn about the model, their plans, and current projects.

You have a new person in the team where are they from, and what is their role?

The new team member is Fraser Dennison who is in the final assessment stage of completing his PhD in climate model evaluation at the University of Canterbury. He is originally from Timaru; his background is in engineering and physics. As a PhD student, he was jointly supervised by Adrian McDonald, the newly appointed Processes & Observations programme leader, and myself.  Fraser’s topic was the influence of ozone depletion and other factors on Southern-Hemisphere climate. In his current project for the Deep South Challenge, he is further developing stratospheric chemistry in the NZESM, with the hope to improve the simulation of ozone in the model. Such an improved simulation may result in better representation of the role of ozone depletion on the climate of our region.

Are we on track?  What are the challenges?

Yes, we are generally on track regarding the technology of hosting and availability of the model. Over the course of the last year, the NZESM user group has been established; it is set to grow further, particularly outside NIWA. A challenge is that our supercomputer is quite small; we are looking forward to seeing it replaced over the course of 2017. We have not yet contributed any substantial code changes to the UKESM/NZESM – it takes time to get established, to understand the details of the model formulation, and then to devise ways to improve it.

What do you hope we will achieve with the NZESM? What are the implications for NZ decision makers?

Our hope is to develop a leading internationally used climate modelling tool, improving climate information available in New Zealand, both at the global and the regional scale.  For NZ decision makers this will hopefully mean access to more reliable climate projections.  There is a lot of regional detail in these projections. We anticipate that we will to provide localised climate projections to a range of decision makers, e.g. a kiwifruit grower in Tauranga deciding on future fruit varieties, or a council investing in drainage in a low lying coastal town.  They will also have access to experts with hands-on experience in producing these simulations who can give them advice on the assumptions and uncertainties associated with these projections. Also quite generally, this activity will considerably raise NZ’s profile in the international climate modelling scene.

Read:  First Year Anniversary for climate modeller Dr Jonny Williams   

We talked to Dr Mike Williams about his new role as the Deep South Challenge Director, the challenges and opportunities and his recent research trip to Antarctica.

You’ve been in the Director’s sea now, for three months – what attracted you to the Deep South Challenge?

I have been involved with the about the Deep South Challenge since its earliest days as the leader of the Processes and Observations Programme and part of the Science Leadership Team. I’m passionate about this issue because it’s going to affect our children, our grandchildren and New Zealand society for generations to come.  The Deep South Challenge is about starting now, understanding what changes are likely to happen and in what time-frames so all New Zealanders can make better decisions around things like land-use and infrastructure, and other things that we need to plan for.  It’s a privilege to lead such an important science project and to ensure it delivers for all New Zealanders. 

What have been some great things? And some challenges?

The best thing so far is seeing the Challenge established and moving forward. Over the last few years we have been slowly building the Challenge components, and next year we will see the final aspects of the core Challenge programme coming together. The biggest challenge for me is getting to grips with all the other programmes in the Challenge, and ensuring that they work together so together they can be more than the sum of the parts.  What’s exciting is that are not only building on the traditional science expertise in New Zealand, we are also drawing new research communities together to build new integrative research programmes.  This of course is a challenge but we’re trying to reach out to communities, businesses and other stakeholders so they can use the full spectrum of New Zealand’s climate research knowledge to understand how climate change will impact on New Zealand, what the financial risks and implications are, but also where the opportunities might be.

What are some of the projects that you’re really excited about?

I’m still really excited about the physical science where we are observing and understanding processes and linking this understanding to building and establishing an earth system model that utilizes New Zealand’s strong heritage with ocean, sea-ice and atmospheric physics and Antarctica.  But I’m proud of the strong scientific research that we have built in all our programmes.  It’s an ambitious Challenge as it tackles a variety of disciplines from ocean physics to decision making, and needs us to understand the range of impacts changing climate will have across industry and communities.

The new work I’m excited about is the series of dialogues that we are developing in the Impacts and Implications programme supported by the Engagement programme.  I think these will give us a real opportunity to listen to various sectors, hear what makes their decisions complex and open up ideas for the research that is needed to help these sectors make decisions in a changing climate.  They also have the potential to include various communities into the conversation so enabling also bring the consequences of climate change to the public.  In this way we can make the new technology and research relevant to New Zealanders and the decisions they make.

Tell us about your research in Antarctica, and how it’s connected to the Deep South Challenge

We were doing field work on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound, near New Zealand’s Scott Base, to validate remote sensing measurements observed with airborne equipment. We do this by comparing the airborne measurements to direct physical measurements of sea ice. I was leading the ocean component of the programme while my colleagues were taking ice and snow thickness and structure measurements. But the key part of our project was to test fly an electromagnetic induction bird (EM-bird), new technology that that is towed about 100 metres under a plane. This is the first time this has been done in Antarctica, and is the key step for us in extending our measurements to a wider region of Antarctica as this equipment will be able to go further than scientists can on foot or by towing the EM-bird under a helicopter.   

This work is a vital component of the Deep South National Science Challenge because Antarctic sea ice has not been well modelled in global climate models. Typically climate models have expected sea ice to retreat over the last few decades, the opposite trend to that seen in the observations. Sea ice is a key controller of climate processes in the Deep South region, so getting sea ice right in climate and earth system models is really important, and something we can only do with wider observations of sea ice. These observations underpin a new understanding of processes that we can incorporate into the New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM) to better represent sea ice. This will be a potentially be major contribution to the international modelling effort.

This is part of a research programme with the Universities of Otago and Canterbury and also with Canadian and German collaborators. Find out more about the Deep South Challenge sea-ice modelling project.

It’s been a year since climate scientist Dr Jonny Williams ventured to New Zealand to join the Deep South Challenge as part of the Earth System Modelling & Prediction team.  We asked him about his work, his background and his first year in New Zealand.

I’m climate scientist – my role, which is funded by the Deep South Challenge and hosted at the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) is to develop and document the New Zealand Earth System Model or NZESM. I also support other users of the model and act as a liaison between New Zealand and the international members of our modelling consortium, which includes the weather and climate agencies of the UK, Australia, South Korea and South Africa.

I come from England, originally, and after my PhD studies in solar energy conversion at Bath University, I worked at the Met Office in Exeter (the UK equivalent of the weather and climate work of New Zealand’s MetService and NIWA) as part of the climate model development team. After this I worked for an environmental consultancy firm in Bristol where I worked on everything from carbon footprint analysis, the effects of marine planning law on birds and tourism to the environmental impacts of landfill and product reuse. After this I moved to Bristol University where I spent five years working on paleo-climate simulations of the extreme warm climates of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods using climate models; when dinosaurs ruled the Earth!

The role with the Deep South Challenge appealed in many ways. Simply the ability to experience life in New Zealand was a factor due to the incredible beauty and natural spectacle of the country but two other factors outweighed this. The first one was the knowledge that I would be working in small teams compared to many of those that I was used to. This presents challenges, for sure, but it also provides opportunities to ‘muck in’ and be involved with a much more varied day-to-day workflow. The second was the opportunity to work in an oceanic region which, geographically speaking, has a huge influence on global climate but which is relatively poorly understood compared to, say, the North Atlantic. The Southern Ocean, which is one of our main focal areas, presents huge challenges for climate scientists due to the difficulty in taking measurements in such a vast, unforgiving area of open ocean. However, the opportunity to work with a group of modellers, observationalists and Antarctic explorers was too good to pass up.

I have been fortunate in my time at NIWA, that I have travelled from my base in Wellington to Auckland and Queenstown in order to present at conferences and to Melbourne to meet new collaborators at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. I have also engaged with new colleagues at GNS and the MetService and will be doing so, for example, at the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council in the coming few months to discuss future effects of climate change and weather extremes on a local level. I’m enjoying working in a greater variety of professional situations compared to my previous roles; although I am primarily employed to develop the NZESM, I am able to engage to communities outside of my academic ‘comfort zone’. This can be challenging but it makes for a varied and interesting role in the Deep South Challenge.

Congratulations to Dr Judy Lawrence, who has been appointed co-chair of a specialised team to advise the Government on how New Zealand can adapt to climate change, announced by Hon Paula Bennett, Minister for Climate Change Issues. 

Dr Lawrence is based at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University leads a new project within the Deep South National Science Challenge. The project aims to better understand the scale and scope of cascading climate change impacts and implications across New Zealand. In particular, how they interact, who is affected, where inter-dependencies and co-dependencies occur, and how far impacts and implications might extend across multiple sectors. 

Read more

Press release: Climate change adaptation experts appointed

Project page: Dr Lawrence’s work in the Deep South Challenge

Public Talk: On the emergence of unusual, unfamiliar and unknown climates  – patterns of change and why it matters.

The concept of ‘Time of Emergence’ (ToE), which characterises when significant signals of climate change will emerge from existing variability, is a useful and increasingly common metric.  Professor Dave Frame and PhD candidate Luke Harrington from the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute recently presented their latest findings at Victoria University. Professor Frame reflects on the essential messages.

What is the most important message that your current research is revealing?

For several years scientists have understood that climate change emerges above local climate variability at different rates in different places, emerging fastest in tropical regions and a lot more slowly in the storm tracks and polar regions. This pattern corresponds with a lot of important climate impacts, such as extreme hot periods, impacts on certain crops and so on. In the new research we’re starting to examine how robust these patterns are and what the patterns look like under different climate scenarios and in different models, factoring in issues such as population. At this stage it’s still a work in progress, but some pretty strong regularities are emerging.

What would you like decision makers to take away from this research?

The need to pay more attention to climate change on the timescales of decades, and to be aware of the speed of emerging climate change in the Pacific. Some of the largest changes in terms of shifts in the distribution of seasonal or annual temperatures are occurring between us and the equator. This affects not only New Zealand but also countries with whom we have close ties.

This work has been submitted for peer review and publication and we will report further in due course.

For more information email the New Zealand Climate Change Research Insitute

Two Climathon teams attracted the acknowledgement and ongoing support of the Deep South Challenge Engagement team whose goal it is to enable New Zealanders to make informed decisions in regard to climate change.  The awards were presented by Rebecca Mills, strategist and Board member of the Deep South Challenge Board.  

For the second year running, the Deep South National Science Challenge has sponsored and supported the Wellington event in an international initiative to get people thinking about mitigation and adaption in a changing climate.  Major Justin Lester opened the event outlining Wellington’s unique challenges such as its significant reclaimed land and vulnerability to sea level rise, also its adaptability; Wellington is a great city with potential to mobilise public support.  Dave Frame, Professor of climate change at Victoria University and immediate past director of the Challenge, gave a whirlwind intro to set the scene and the challenge, noting sea level rise as the most significant challenge to Wellington’s coastal capital by 2100. He highlighted the power of citizens to make a difference from the ground up and public action.

Ideas to help Wellington address climate change ranged from adaption ideas such rethinking the city’s infrastructure, to activities that would help reduce waste that reach our landfills therefore reducing carbon emissions.  The Deep South Challenge was particularly interested in projects that focussed on community engagement and enabled informed decision making.  The Deep South Challenge also offered further mentoring and potential funding for projects that engaged with the public and helped them make climate related decisions.  Two teams stood out with this kind of goal – one team will be exploring the possibility of a Wellington based online magazine to help people understand climate issues, and what they can do.  The other team will look at developing a social application to connect interested people with climate related activities – noted the Tinder for climate.  The Engagement programme, is particularly interested in using a range of technologies to reaching new audiences.

Climathon 2016 – in the media

Our Changing World – Alison Ballance reviews the Climathon on Radio New Zealand’s Our Changing World. You can listen to the podcast here.

One News – Sean Hogan also attended and prepared a news report. View the One News video.

Access Radio – Prior to the Climathon event, Emily Grinter from VicLink and Bart De Vries from Motif were interviewed by Access Radio to outline the plan for the event. Listen to the Access Radio podcast.

Online climate magazine

Collaborate for change

In collaboration with the University of Otago Division of Sciences, the Deep South Challenge’s Vision Mātauranga science programme is offering two Master’s Scholarships.

The scholarships have been established to build cross-disciplinary research capability and capacity in global change studies to help meet the emerging demands of increasingly complex social, economic, political and bio-physical system changes facing Māori and wider Aotearoa/New Zealand society. Projects are sought that will contribute to the following four research themes:

Theme 1

Understanding climate change – linkages, pressure points and potential responses

Theme 2

Exploring adaptation options for Māori communities

Theme 3

Assistance to Māori businesses to aid decision-making and long-term sustainability

Theme 4

Products, services and systems derived from mātauranga Māori*

* Includes: Te Reo Māori and Tikanga MāoriFor more information including the application process please visit the Otago University Scholarships page