In the aftermath of the MV Rena grounding in the Bay of Plenty, complaints were taken to the Waitangi Tribunal and the Environment Court about the way local and central government handled the disaster.
Once the Rena had stranded on Otaiti (Astrolabe Reef), the Crown acted quickly – making decisions about if, how and when to remove the wreck. In its haste, it overlooked its Treaty of Waitangi obligations to actively protect and partner with mana whenua. The Tribunal found that the Crown had breached the Treaty, and in particular let iwi down by not facilitating consultation – putting at risk “their ability to engage meaningfully in the resource consent [RMA] process.”
New research, led by Catherine Iorns (Victoria University of Wellington) and funded by the Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate, explores the Crown’s potential liability under the Treaty of Waitangi for decisions about how we might adapt to climate change. The research suggests that the MV Rena decision, along with other key case studies, provides guidance for the Crown about its Treaty duties in relation to climate adaptation decision-making.
It finds, for example, that the Crown should not create policies and laws that undermine the ability of iwi to protect the whenua (land). In the case of climate adaptation, this is difficult, because while this duty is on the Crown, many – if not most – climate adaptation decisions are currently being made by local and regional councils under the Resource Management Act (RMA). Further, as with the MV Rena, the Treaty obligations of active protection and partnership, especially the facilitation of consultation, will apply, even in commercial negotiations with an overlay of confidentiality and urgency.
The research explores five case studies (at Matatā, the Hawkes Bay, Mōkau River, Waitara and in Whaingaroa/Raglan), and concludes that central government should be playing more of a role in guiding local government decision-making processes, to ensure the Treaty principles of partnership, governance, reciprocity, active protection, good faith, consultation and development are followed in climate adaptation decision-making processses.
Active protection suggests the maintenance of Māori relationships with the coast. Iorns’ research finds that central government funding (as the Treaty partner) should therefore first be directed towards maintaining these relationships.
Where managed retreat needs to be discussed, especially from ancestral lands, tangata whenua will likely need to involved as equal partners in decision-making – a relationship involving more than “significant consultation” by the Crown. If there is to be managed retreat from the coast, relationships with traditional territories would still need to be maintained even in the absence of ownership. For that, access to coastal territories would be required.
The climate adaptation measures needed both now and in the future will likely have significant implications for the protection of iwi taonga/assets under Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi. Iorns finds that central and local government need to keep in mind the wider picture of upholding Treaty principles, rather than the minimum conditions in the RMA, in order to avoid modern Treaty breaches in relation to these assets. This necessarily implies that more attention must be paid to factual and legal issues in this area, to ensure that the Treaty of Waitangi is upheld, as we change in time for our changing climate. Please find the full report and more information about Catherine Iorns’ research here.
This three-part webinar series draws from the Climate-Adaptive Communities research project of the Deep South Challenge.
Climate change is already impacting councils and communities Around New Zealand, people are starting to grapple with the challenges of increasing sea levels, groundwater levels, and more severe flood events. As well as impacting on infrastructure, these will have significant societal implications both in the short term and long term. In the near future, many councils will need to start engaging with exposed communities about what this might mean.
This three-part webinar series draws from the Climate-Adaptive Communities research project of the Deep South Challenge. The research included a survey of councils and case studies of several local authority areas that are exposed to climate change impacts. We looked at how councils are engaging with their communities, how communities (especially those more susceptible to harm) may be affected, and what adaptation initiatives are already being undertaken by iwi and communities.
Director of the Centre for Sustainability Dr Janet Stephenson, along with Grace Hall, Sophie Bond, and Gradon Diprose will be your presenters on these essential topics.
Presented in partnership with the Deep South Challenge, these webinars are offered free of charge.
Furthermore, as part of this work we have produced 2 short videos, a council briefing document, and a cartoon, to help in conveying key messages to a broad audience of councils, communities, and government. These are available to be part of the package of webinars.
To register for this series, please email [email protected]. Click the links below to find out more about each webinar.
To minimise suffering as we adapt to climate change, and to adapt successfully, local authorities need new ways to engage with communities.
Every regional council in the country, and over a quarter of our local councils, face extreme exposure to climate hazards like coastal erosion, flooding and rising groundwater levels.
Over the coming years, communities will have to make near-impossible decisions – from how to pay for expensive coastal defence systems to when we should think about picking up our survey pegs and walking backwards from the coastline.
Communities will face increasing physical, social, financial and emotional challenges, and councils are already looking to central government to provide a cohesive framework for the planning and funding of adaptation. But to minimise suffering as we adapt – and to adapt successfully – local authorities also need new ways to engage with communities.
Recently concluded research by a team led by Janet Stephenson (University of Otago), draws on stories and insights from community members, iwi members and council staff. Their project findings suggest that council engagement with communities about climate impacts requires more than ‘business as usual’ engagement processes, because:
Adaptive decisions will need to be made at many points in time, probably over decades
These decisions often have to be made without a full understanding of what the future holds
Multiple individual decisions could result in inequitable outcomes, unless council has an overview of implications for the entire community
The community members most severely affected may well be those who are least empowered and least accustomed to ‘having a say’ in council decisions
It takes time to build the trust and capacity to be involved in decisions that have such far-reaching implications.
This research enriches the existing MfE Coastal Hazards and Climate Change Guidance by providing advice for councils and community groups on how and when to engage on climate change. The guidance recommends a Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning (DAPP) approach to engagement, by which critical decision points for adaptation investments are pre-defined.
This framework supports local government staff (from adaptation advisors to community development teams to community groups themselves) to build community readiness to engage at these critical decision points. It also provides tools for those who want to organise together to build resilience:
A survey and report of councils, which explores why councils find it so challenging to meaningfully engage (background report for researchers or those seeking more in-depth information)
Policy guidance (including engagement framework) for local government adaptation and community development staff
Conversation starters for community engagement staff:
Short graphic story introducing two young friends who live in a community affected by climate change. The pair reveal how devastating climate change can be and begin to understand the strength communities have when they work together on solutions
Two short videos based in South Dunedin, one exploring a neighbourhood’s response to the 2015 floods and subsequent events; the other exploring Dunedin City Council’s response and move towards proactively planning for climate hazards.
The iwi of Te Hiku o Te Ika are concerned about the impact of climate change on household drinking water. Results from this research, grounded in three rural Northland communities, have now been published in MAI: A New Zealand Journal of Indigenous Scholarship.
Isolation in the Far North means that roof-fed tank systems are the predominant source of drinking water for these communities. Understanding how climate change will impact water supplies has helped these communities prepare for the future, prioritise actions and mitigate detrimental effects.
The large research team led by Wendy Henwood of Te Rarawa included mana whenua community researchers at each location, iwi members, the Whāriki Research Group (Massey University), ESR and NIWA. Community researchers recorded daily rainfall and temperature data, surveyed household drinking water infrastructure and monitored water quality by taking household samples. NIWA and ESR team members used the data to model climate change scenarios and E.Coli contaminations, and kaumatua contributed mana whenua views.
The project highlighted the potential impacts of the general “hotter, drier” climate predictions for Te Hiku on the security and safety of drinking water supplies. Overall lower rainfall suggested the need for greater tank storage volumes. However, increased ambient temperatures are likely to converge with longer storage periods, to increase the pathogen count in these drinking water stores.
Throughout the research, practical strategies and innovations were shared about how to minimise water contamination, including about where to place septic tanks, how to protect water sources, the need for possum and rat trapping programmes, the importance of regular maintenance and upgrades, and de-sludging tanks. First flush diverters, UV treatment, and filters were described as solutions to improve water quality in some situations. Communities were acutely aware of the need to store more water and this, as well as the need for infrastructure upgrades at a number of households, all involve cost.
While the research focused on household drinking water, the issue was not viewed in isolation. Water is part of the environment, the people, and a whakapapa to Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Fresh and salt-water are the basis for land-use decisions (farming, gardens, orchards, fishing). Lifestyles revolved and revolve around its catchment. By creating specific, located, Māori knowledge about water sustainability, as a key dimension of community viability, this project has kick-started preparations in Te Hiku for the effects of climate change on people, ecosystems, lands and economy.
Quotes from kaumātua are woven throughout the final research report (see below) and are a moving testimony to the wealth of mātauranga Māori held in Te Hiku about our changing climate.
Local kaumatua have always observed and lived by the weather, practised kaitiakitanga, and acknowledged water’s vital interconnectedness with the environment. These elders are not fazed by the impact of climate change. Their resilience stems from a lifetime of working with the weather, growing up valuing water, and having the necessary knowledge and life skills to adapt to changing situations and realities. Theirs is an attitude that broader New Zealand could learn much from.
More and more of New Zealand’s urban settlements are likely to be impacted by climate hazards such as coastal erosion, flooding and rising groundwater levels. Affected communities will face physical, social, financial and emotional challenges.
To minimise suffering in our communities as we adapt to climate change – and to adapt successfully – local authorities will need to adopt new approaches to engagement with communities. We invite you to participate in our next Deep South Seminar, with Janet Stephenson (University of Otago), who leads the project, “Climate adaptation, vulnerability and community well-being.”
This seminar reflects on some of the research findings of the Climate-Adaptive Communities project, which draw on stories and insights shared with the research team by community members, iwi members and council staff.
The team’s early findings suggest that the way councils engage with their communities about climate change impacts must necessarily be different from ‘ordinary’ engagement processes, because:
Adaptive decisions will need to be made at many points in time, probably over decades
These decisions must often be made without a full understanding of what the future holds (i.e. lacking a strong evidence-base with high levels of uncertainty)
Multiple individual decisions could result in inequitable outcomes unless council has an overview of implications for the entire community
The community members most severely affected may well be those who are least empowered and least accustomed to ‘having a say’ in council decisions
It takes time to build the trust and capacity to be involved in decisions that have such far-reaching implications
The research also suggests that councils should start to engage with at-risk communities early, before they begin to experience severe impacts, by:
Helping communities to understand the upcoming challenges
Helping to strengthen people’s ability to ‘have a voice’ in decisions that will affect them, particularly those who are less powerful or more susceptible to harm
Helping build community resilience to deal with current and future stresses
Helping ensure the community has sufficient trust, confidence and capacity to fully engage with councils for key decisions on the adaptive journey.
The Ministry for the Environment recommends a Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning (DAPP) approach, which involves pre-defining critical decision points for adaptation investments (and which is also the subject of other research underway in the Deep South Challenge). A community development approach can underpin DAPP, by building community readiness to engage at these decision points.
Location
PLEASE NOTE, THIS SEMINAR IS NOW OVERSUBSCRIBED. WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND A PHYSICAL HUB, OR TO JOIN YOUR COLLEAGUES TO WATCH FROM THE SAME COMPUTER.
Physical hubs:
University of Otago: Centre for Sustainability Seminar Room, 563 Castle Street North*
NIWA Wellington: Conference Room
NIWA Christchurch: Tekapo Room
University of Canterbury: Meremere 411, School of Law building
*Our presenter will be speaking from this hub.
Please note, all visitors to NIWA must sign in on arrival.
We encourage you to set up your own hub and bring friends and colleagues together to participate in the seminar. Please let us know if you do set up your own hub.
Expressions of interest are being sought for Challenge Leadership Team (CLT) role of Processes and Observations Programme Leader in the Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate. Applications close Friday 12 July 2019.
The Challenge undertakes and coordinates research to achieve its mission of “enabling New Zealanders to anticipate, adapt, manage risk, and thrive in a changing climate.” The Challenge has been renewed for Phase 2 (2019-2024) and is currently establishing its portfolio of research across Climate Modelling, Observations for Model Development, and the Challenge’s four Domains (Māori, Communities, Infrastructure, and the National Economy).
Each science project team works with key partners and stakeholders (researchers and end-users) to co-create, develop, implement, and disseminate research findings within, and across, each science programme. Integration with other climate-relevant New Zealand research programmes is also a priority.
The Processes and Observations Programme Leader position will provide critical science and planning support to the Deep South Challenge. You will draw on your extensive national and international knowledge and research networks to ensure the wider Challenge research programme contributes to the mission. You will work closely with the Deep South Challenge team to ensure Observational based research is integrated within the Challenge, and will strengthen and develop relationships with stakeholders, end users, other research providers and other research programmes, including the Antarctic Science Platform and the other National Science Challenges. A clear vision of the pathway from science to impact will be necessary to achieve the Challenge’s mission.
Our Observations for Model Development which will be led by Processes and Observations Programme Leader builds on the successful Phase One Processes and Observations programme while aiming to further integrate with other challenge research. Initial Phase Two projects will be contracted shortly, while further research will be developed following identification of the observational science which will be most relevant to answering the Challenge’s mission.
The successful applicant will have the exciting opportunity to be part of the process to define our research in Phase 2. We therefore require a strategic thinker, who can operate effectively as part of a team and assist in pulling together multidisciplinary research teams. The successful applicant will also be able to demonstrate extensive experience in co-creating research in close collaboration with stakeholders.
Up to 0.25 FTE is available for this position, for an initial two year appointment from 1 September 2019, with the possibility of continuing by mutual agreement.
The CLT is led by the Challenge Director and comprises the Challenge Manager, and one representative for each of the five Challenge Programmes. The Director reports to the Deep South Challenge Governance Group. Our other advisory groups include the Kāhui Māori, Independent Science Panel and a Representative User Group.
Please submit your CV together with a covering letter outlining your experience and interest in the role to the Challenge Manager, Anne-Marie Rowe, [email protected] by no later than 5 pm Friday 12 July 2019.
For more information regarding this position, contact the Challenge Director, Dr Mike Williams ([email protected], +64-4-386-0389).
I MEET PETER INSLEY on a low promontory that rests above the Hāparapara River. Kids have built a rickety jumping platform in the pūriri and mānuka above us, but the water below – blue and glistening – looks treacherous. It’s hard to gauge the depth or see the snags. The river has always behaved like this. It beelines out of the hills and hits this hard rock, pooling and gathering before sweeping off again towards Omaio Bay in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.
Peter Insley above the Hāparapara.
In the days of Peter’s childhood, the river flats and coastal terraces of Omaio were in sheep and beef, which the community worked collectively. His parents and grandparents, and their peers, chose to take water from this location, installing a pipe and pump to serve their farming operations.
Today, it’s once more the site of close environmental monitoring. The whānau of Omaio again need water. They need drinking water, for people’s homes and for their marae. And they need water to realise their development plans, which include planting out the kinds of crops that attract top-dollar on local and international markets. They need to know if their rivers can sustain them, especially as the climate changes.
“This summer,” says Peter, cautious to speak at first, “we haven’t had much rain. One of our rivers, Tikinui, the whole length of it dried out, that’s about three kilometres.” It’s never happened before to Peter’s knowledge, and he’s been up in the hills since he was a boy. He seems to wear these waterways, this bush, all over him. He’s ahi kā, and while he’s in high demand across the motu, he has no interest in leaving.
Peter Insley is the man on the ground in the Deep South Challenge Vision Mātauranga project, “Climate-friendly, high-value crops for the whānau of Omaio.” A partnership between Te Rau Aroha Trust and NIWA, the project is supporting Omaio landowners to learn more about their water, their weather and their changing climate.
This project represents one piece of a complex puzzle the whānau need to solve before they decide which crop to invest their precious time and resources into. Other puzzle pieces include the shifting appetites of export markets, changing regulatory requirements, whānau buy-in, and the imperative that landowners consider multiple land-use options to build and maintain resilience.
At the moment, kiwifruit is looking like Te Rau Aroha’s most likely choice. But frosts are becoming fewer and far between, spring’s arriving earlier and vines are flowering sooner, our days are warming up, summers are becoming longer and drier, pest and disease profiles are changing, the wind’s increasing in strength and storms are getting worse, as floods waters wrestle with the rising seas. The Trust needs to be certain that the crop they choose, and even the cultivar, will be sustainable for at least the next 20 to 30 years.
The project is providing the community of Omaio with the tools and the training to monitor essential climate, weather, hydrology and soil data – so they can better consider and respond to changing climatic conditions – now and into the future.
ON THE 19TH of every month, Peter comes to the Hāparapara to test the water. At 7am – later than Peter would ordinarily start – I find him wading back and forth across the river, testing for water flow, sediment, e-coli, phosphates and nitrates.
By every measure, the river is clean, despite inputs from logging and other activities.
“Yep,” Peter chuckles. “I drink it and I’ve never gotten sick. I haven’t heard of anyone dying from it. The pigs, the deer, the birds and bees, they all drink it. Up river,” Peter gestures towards the mountains in the distance, “there’s big, healthy shags nesting, those noisy plovers, and kōtuku.”
The high bush is also home to a community of kōkako, which need constant predator protection by Peter and others.
The terraced fields of Omaio step gently up from the coast until they’re blocked by towering, bush-covered hills. This is Te Whānau a Apanui country, highly fertile and mostly still in Māori ownership – not such a common combination in modern-day Aotearoa.
Unlike the highly developed blocks in the Western Bay of Plenty, the remote coastline here is planted mainly in maize – stock feed – on land leased by landowners to growers from out of town. What whānau (represented by various small trusts) earn from their land only just covers the rates.
“It’s rubbish stuff,” says Chris Karamea Insley, Peter’s brother, and a trustee of Te Rau Aroha. “It’s low-value, and it brings the rats. Come out here with night glasses on, you’ll see rats everywhere.” Maize provides no local employment and contributes nothing to the local economy.
Still, the land feels lush and clean – more sheltered than Te Tairāwhiti round the cape, and less commercial than the country I drove through from Tauranga (on a coastal road that in parts was falling away, the result of coastal erosion and remnant Pacific cyclones). Whakaari is a constant smoking presence on the horizon. It feels quiet and peaceful, but Karamea is adamant that I look deeper.
Here in Omaio, there’s no mobile reception. There’s only one shop, but it no longer sells the saddles, dynamite or fresh produce it sold back before New Zealand’s export market for wool and meat dried up, and one generation and then another moved to the city in search of work. Unemployment and its associated strife is high.
Like a logging truck, you could barrel through Omaio, seeing and hearing nothing except the sound of your own engine.
We spend a moment talking about the differences between today and the Omaio of Peter and Karamea’s childhood.
“Unemployment?” Peter laughs. “That’s not a word that ever entered anyone’s brain. If you weren’t helping out your grandfather, grandmother, uncle, your mum or dad, well you were down the road helping someone else out – hay baling, sheep, whatever. It was communal, everyone helped. No one ever really got paid… so I guess we didn’t know about full employment either…!
“In those days,” Peter nods at our photographer, “everyone’s names were together. Down the marae, we all scratched our names into the wood. No one ever took a photo, you didn’t need to. Everyone was around, everyone was busy, we were always active, out in the garden… When we weren’t doing that we were fishing, swimming, diving, roaring [for deer], taking the dogs to go hunting for pigs or possums. The old ones, even to relax they’d sit down and do their weaving. There was never an idle moment.”
They want to come home. And science will be the enabler.
Chris Karamea Insley
Peter and Karamea hope, and have good evidence to support their hopes, that shifting into high-value crops will generate enough jobs and other activity in the local economy to bring whānau home.
“They want to come home,” says Karamea. “And science will be the enabler.”
AT THE HĀPARAPARA, Peter tests the water manually, but on other key sites throughout Omaio, environmental monitoring is being automated.
Karamea takes me to visit a land block owned by Te Rau Aroha, which the Trust hopes will become the first whānauowned and managed orchard in Omaio. The paddock is lying fallow at the moment. The trustees negotiated a rates abatement with council, for the period in which they need to plan and then to plant.
We scramble off the edge of the block into a dark, bush-clad gully – kō Wherurere te ngahere. Pīwaiwaka lead and follow us down the soft earth track. The Mitiwai stream cuts through the rock – a trickle when we find it, but the steep sides of the gully show us what can happen in big rain.
Te Rau Aroha are looking to have a covenant placed over this gully. Restricting the water they themselves can take, and locking future generations into careful water usage, means any irrigation will have to depend on careful planning and finely tuned water storage.
Peter and the NIWA technicians have been here long before us, installing a water pressure gauge and embedding markers in the rock from which the height of the stream is measured. Up in the paddock, roped off and in full sun, a sophisticated weather station gathers this and other information from Omaio’s various monitoring sites – soil temperature and soil moisture, rainfall, wind strength and solar radiation. Once a day, the entire data set is beamed, via satellite, to the NIWA office in Christchurch.
The NIWA team are building an online dashboard, accessible via smartphone, which gives Peter and others at Omaio real-time access to their environmental information.
NIWA hydrologist MS Srinivasan gives me a virtual tour, showing me how the tool will help whānau make on-the-fly decisions about irrigation and fertiliser use – maximising water availability for the plants and minimising environmental harm. The tool also integrates historical weather and soil moisture data, to give an accessible picture of how the soil in each location behaves when it rains, and provides weather and climate forecasting.
As the project moves forward, whānau members will be trained in how to use the tool to inform decision making around the use of water, for commercial and community purposes.
Such comprehensive data, coupled with other climate and scenario modelling, including for Bay of Plenty kiwifruit, means the whānau can work with crop specialists (Plant and Food, for example) to assess the strengths and vulnerabilities of one crop over another.
BUT SUCH AN INTIMATE analysis of local conditions, and the development of technology to capitalise on those conditions, is not new in Omaio.
Danny Poihipi is a renowned Te Whānau a Apanui fisherman and gardener, and an expert in the tikanga that governs these practices. His vast knowledge of the Omaio environment guides the Insley brothers, and the Trust, in their decision-making processes.
Danny arrives at the Insley family homestead bearing two mismatched pears and a loosely woven kete, which he places beside him. A silver plait slips down his neck. We have a cuppa before starting – our tea cups clink as we add sugar and long-life milk. Once he begins speaking, other priorities fall away.
“The rūnanga,” Danny tells us, “gave me some kaupapa to carry. I carry them out to the best of my ability. One thing for me is sustainability, through old technology, or new technology.” Danny’s first language is Māori, and it takes my Pākehā ears a while to settle into Danny’s rhythm, which ebbs and flows around his subject like the incoming tide.
“Trying to upkeep and uphold our unbroken chain, from our forefathers to us today. First the culture, the preservation of our culture, [then] the growing of our food and the keeping of our technology.”
At first the strands of Danny’s kōrero seem disparate, but with time he weaves them together. He circles back again. “We’ve got an unbroken chain from our atua horihori, our atua Māori… We have an idea for them in the garden, Rongomatāne and Haumietiketike. They look after all the fern root crops, and ngā hua whenua, that’s the food on top of the ground.”
I ask Danny what he thinks about kiwifruit.
But he’s a master storyteller, and won’t be drawn by direct, mundane questions. Instead, he makes a fishing net out of his words.
He picks up one of the pears. “There were no apples and peaches and plums and grapes here, so our people ate a lot of kiekie, one was the fruit, and one was the flower they ate, the tāwhara. And the teure is the cone of the kiekie. They ate that as well.”
Danny tells the whakapapa of these pears, recalling who brought the trees to Omaio and when. And for the next hour or so, he takes us on a tour of his food cupboard, his pātaka kai, explaining which fruits and foods and fish and plants are harvested at which times of the month or year.
He shows us the abundance of his garden and his sea. He talks in detail about the timing for planting, and methods for harvesting, for building weirs, for setting traps, for netting, for fishing with bait. He talks about how to preserve hua whenua in dry storage, and how to preserve a fish like kahawai, by standing them upright and wrapping them with bracken fern – a preservative – then stacking them in a hāngī til they’re dark brown and hard.
“I make a lot of fermented food,” he says. “I’ve got some mussels that have been in the water for one week and the flies, ooh… they’re falling off the water! You just go like this,” Danny sweeps his hand in front of him, brushing the flies aside. “It takes about a week for the shell to open, you got a huruhuru on that, and when you pull it out like this, it’s ready,” Danny laughs. “The young ones see the flies on the water and turn their nose up, like this.”
He talks about food as medicine, foods that complement each other, foods that support people as they grow older. “When you eat it, the smell is nothing at all to the sweetness of those fermented mussels… Your puku becomes adapted, as you get older. When you’re young, a child, the stomach is not ready to digest those foods. But as age comes on, you hunger for it. I hunger for it.”
He describes key ceremonies, and shares waiata that relate to specific foods, as well as to specific ancestors. It’s living practice.
“They say to me, ‘You kill a lot of sharks.’ I say, ‘there’s a time of the year when we hunger for the liver of the shark.’ There’s a name for it, kōkī… No matter whether it’s the grey nurse shark or a blue fin shark or a thresher shark, what we want is the liver. Oh, my family, they go berkas on it… The way to cook kōkī is straight into the pot with water, boil it for 10 minutes or so, and it starts breaking up. Not too long cooking, once it starts breaking up, time to eat it. People say to me, ‘What do I do after that, when it starts breaking up?’ I say, ‘Oh, you ring me up.’”
THE SHARING OF food to build community is, or was, universal. But our modern, global food trade necessitates a different way of thinking about the relationship between food production, food consumption and community building.
Peter Insley says, “If we’re gonna grow food for the worldwide community, we need to take care of these hills. This is a place to teach the young ones. We need to invest in science, get our kids interested in science. We hope they’ll go from school and on to uni, access scholarships, and then we’ll get them back here.”
I meet Kimiora Webster, the nearnew principal of Te Whānau a Apanui Area School in Omaio Bay, outside in the playground. Kimiora is working with Te Rau Aroha Trust to investigate how to bring science into the curriculum, and to get his school kids out into the environment.
“We don’t call it science,” Kimiora says. “We call it living. We freak out about the word science. But we have no trouble going out to get us a feed. When I first started teaching,” he continues, “my goal was to become a science teacher. That’s because I hated science, and I wanted my kids to love science.”
Kimiora gathers together some of the senior students, and we head to a local land-block which was leased some years ago and converted into kiwifruit. The manager of the block is happy to work with the Trust – he himself is benefiting from the science. NIWA has installed monitoring equipment here, specifically to gather data about rainfall and soil moisture at various depths.
The vines are laden with massive SunGold kiwifruit, the size of which I’ve never seen before. Horiana Anderson and Shonita Wikaire wander through the orchard. Shonita’s family own the block, and she picks here in the school holidays. “This one’s no good,” she tells us. “Too long. Too flat. This one’s not round enough. That one would never make it.”
Kimiora’s vision for place-based learning, for whānau-run orchards, and for the local economy, is that it all might operate like a marae, where everyone has a role and can play to their strengths. “The kids feel comfortable on the marae,” he says. Everyone has a place and knows what to do. And there’s so much to learn here – from environmental management, communications technology and climate science to the fully integrated mātauranga practiced by Danny and other gardeners and fisher people on the coast.
For now, the girls say they’ll leave Omaio once they finish school. Shonita’s thinking about dentistry; Horiana would like to become a physical trainer, and to keep up with waka ama. Neither are keen to work in the orchard. But with a local economy to support them, they could return to practise their professions on the coast – living and working on their ancestral land.
SUNGOLD IS NOT the variety that’s always been grown on the coast, and it’s not the variety New Zealand climate science knows most about.
The Deep South Challenge itself was established in the wake of the Climate Change Impacts and Implications (CCII) programme that ran from 2012 to 2016. The research programme undertook case studies to understand likely climate impacts on New Zealand’s varied types of agricultural land. One case study area was the lowlands of Papamoa, in the Bay of Plenty. The project examined the climate impacts of flooding, inundation, rising seas and pests on the region, with one focus on how climate change would affect kiwifruit yield. The study was initiated by Zespri’s then-Head of Innovation Alistair Mowat.
Andrew Tait, who co-led CCII with Daniel Rutledge from Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, and who is still involved in the Deep South Challenge, explains. “Alistair’s proposal was to assess the impact of seasonal temperature variability on kiwifruit production. We decided to use simple temperature indices, rather than taking the traditional approach of modelling plant physiology. We chose the Hayward variety, as there are many years of production data available, particularly for the Bay of Plenty region.”
But the project got going just as the Psa crisis was ramping up, the effect of which was ultimately to see Hayward taken out of orchards and replaced with the Psa-resistant SunGold variety. Another key difference between these cultivars is the Hayward’s greater reliance on winter chilling, making it more vulnerable to a warming climate.
Orchardists had no choice but to adapt immediately, but the CCII project took longer to realise the extent of the transition underway in the industry. By the time its findings were presented in Papamoa, the Bay of Plenty had left Hayward behind.
Nevertheless, the science was exciting. Alistair Mowat says, “[That] modelling… has helped make the future scenarios of climate change more tangible for growers. In combination with the introduction of new cultivars, as well as information on how leading growers are successfully developing and adopting new management practices to adapt to climate change, the kiwifruit industry is confident about its long-term future.”
As a climate scientist, Andrew says he’s learned a lot about “deep engagement” with stakeholders in the last nine years, from the start of the CCII work right through to joining the Challenge in a leadership role. “The way the Challenge is doing engagement is a completely different model to CCII, which relied on methods of the past: localised case study approaches, investing a lot of effort to bring stakeholders together in the early stages, then reporting back at the end.
“As it is with a lot of science, [in CCII] that true engagement with decision makers in the industry didn’t come to pass. So, I like what the Challenge is trying to do now, with a dedicated engagement programme. A lot more effort and research has gone into building stronger relationships with stakeholders and asking how we can better integrate those key decision makers into our research design. It’s a massively difficult area to be working in. Nobody has got it right all the time, but globally this is becoming standard practice, where the research community talks about co-development, collaboration and co-creation of knowledge.”
There are parallels in the Omaio project. Embedding community researchers like Peter and Danny into the project – par for the course in kaupapa Māori research – is one way of ensuring the knowledge chain remains unbroken.
A new incarnation of the CCII work is underway in another Challenge project, “Climate change & its effect on our agricultural land”. In partnership with the Our Land and Water National Science Challenge, Manaaki Whenua’s Anne-Gaelle Ausseil is investigating how climate change will impact the suitability of particular regions for food production.
With case study areas in Nelson, Waikato and Tauranga, Anne-Gaelle’s research pulls together historical knowledge and climate modelling, with a little bit of educated guesswork, to mimic the effects of climate change on local soil conditions and seasonal patterns.
Communities, industry and government should be able to take these modelling packages and use them to analyse their local or specific needs. A picture of more severe drought may require some communities to invest in water storage or redistribution systems. A picture with increased storm activity might trigger other communities to invest in fruit or crop protection mechanisms.
Anne-Gaelle looks at what we do know and interrogates issues we know less about. For example, how will the land itself absorb carbon, adapt and change? There’s evidence that with more carbon available, plants use water more efficiently. But both scientists and growers are yet to see how this plays out.
While the research is being applied locally there are national lessons to be learned. By identifying a range of likely scenarios and raising some tricky “what if” questions, food producers will be able to assess the risks and plan for those they can’t tolerate.
It’s an approach that builds resilience and is very much in play in the kiwifruit industry, as Alistair Mowat makes clear. It’s also the approach Omaio is taking – analysing the whole landscape before putting everything into a single product.
“IN MY DREAM last night,” Danny laughs, “I dreamed I was catching eels. The blimmin’ eels, we were pulling them out, and they were already pāwhara, and some of them were in packets! We were pulling them out of the creek like that… These tunas, we were going to be cooking them. Na! They were coming out already prepared!”
I could keep listening to Danny and his hidden metaphors forever. But I’m not Danny’s key audience. After school, we pick up Danny’s moko Horiana and head to the rocky shoreline, so Danny can show us how the kit he’s been explaining to us works in practice.
Horiana points out Motunui on the far coastline, and the adjoining beach where she and her mates launch every morning for waka ama training.
“The kaharoa,” Danny says, “is one of the nets that’s locally made. It’s a long net. The longest net in our history is the Kupenga a Te Huki. It’s a living net, it’s the whakapapa net that goes from Whangarā mai Tawhiti to Pōrangahou. It’s the marriages, the whakapapa links. That’s the biggest kupenga. It’s a human net, and in it you get all the tribes.”
Communities like Omaio have experienced waves of cataclysmic change that may well echo what’s coming with climate change. Settler colonialism, land wars, world wars, loss of taonga, including land and fishing grounds, economic upheaval and cultural loss. I can’t help but think that in order to adapt to our changing climate, we could look at the example set by those who’ve been through it already.
In the face of such fast and drastic change, Danny’s toughness, his resilience, causes me to stop and think. He broadens the parameters for a national conversation about adaptation. Neither Danny, Peter or Horiana have expressed fear or anxiety about the future, even though much of Omaio is at sea level, including two marae. Perhaps, sometimes, the antidote for anxiety is connection and action. Danny and Peter never stop working, and they never stop learning – mastering new technologies and transmitting the lessons of this whenua and their forebears.
For climate researchers and food producers alike, there is so much to learn here.
The investment to get started in kiwifruit is large – it’s not just the orchards, it’s the supporting infrastructure like irrigation, water storage and ongoing environmental monitoring. It’s about figuring out all the jigsaw pieces required to get land-development moving: finance (particularly difficult on multiply owned whānau land), governance, science, relationships with various intermediaries like packhouses, and enough certainty that whānau will return home to work. Not to mention communications technologies (like phone reception or broadband internet) to support efficient farming or an education system that empowers young people to engage in science.
Over our three days in Omaio, Karamea labours this point, “You got to get the economics working. Otherwise whānau won’t come home.”
Keeping so many pieces in hand requires a clear vision and a hell of a lot of energy. Luckily, Omaio is not lacking in energetic visionaries. Three generations, from Danny to the Insley brothers to Horiana, are expressing their dynamism in different ways.
Peter is now completing his Masters in Environmental Science at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. He reflects on a day spent up in the hills wrangling with the question of how to tie all this activity together – invasive weeds, water, the kōkako, food production, climate change – in a Māori way. “It sharpens your thinking,” he says. “You take responsibility for your environment. I do know about this stuff. I’m walking the talk. I’m not just sitting in a classroom or an office doing research, when I can’t actually implement it.”
And Danny provides a crucial depth to the national conversation about sustainability, resilience and risk management. He compels us to maintain an integrated vision that’s responsive to the climate and to the community, and that focusses on building connections – between disciplines, between generations, between science and the communities it serves.
I sometimes feel that a sense of the bigger economic, cultural and relational picture is overlooked in “mainstream” science. But in describing the breathtaking technology of a massive, hand-made fishing net, and speaking both in practical language and in metaphor, Danny finds the relationships between food, technology, trade, sustainability and productive community. He holds an unbroken line from his tūpuna to his grandchildren – a unifying theory and practice I feel we might all try to aspire to.
“That’s all in this pātaka kai,” he says. “It’s the living whakapapa. That’s a pātaka. The knowledge is a pātaka kai, our knowledge. So we fill our pūkuro with the knowledge of this unbroken chain. It’s what’s keeping us together, from our forefathers to us today. It’s in our hangarau, our everyday use of taonga tuku iho. It’s fortunate that we’ve got books now, today, to help preserve it. And rorohiko, another form of preserving. And it may be that we are the last frontier, with all this ancient pātaka kōrero.”
Balancing on the rocks, Danny hands his kete to Horiana. “Here, hine,” he says to her. “You take it. You see,” he chuckles, “you’re the new net.” Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi.
It’s a calm Sunday morning as I arrive at the home of Wellington property investor Paul Robinson, in the thriving beachside community of Plimmerton. Armed with muffins from the local café, I’m greeted by Paul’s friendly border collie Harry, who herds me into a stunning, carefully designed house.
Natural materials enhance the beauty of the coastline. Paths are planted in native coastal grasses and integrate with, rather than seal, the ground underfoot. Cedar cladding is weathering gracefully. The high-spec insulation and double-glazing were revolutionary Northern Hemisphere concepts at the time of building. Concrete flooring retains heat in winter and keeps things cool in summer. In short, the house is efficient, reflecting the Robinson family’s broader approach to property development.
Paul hands me a strong coffee, and we survey the concrete sea-wall separating the property’s edge from the sandy beach, a drop of little less than a metre. This glorious piece of paradise is regularly battered by westerly storms, and on a high tide there’s no beach to speak of.
I first met Paul Robinson several years ago. His family business had grown beyond the work of one person, and his warm optimism belied his personal circumstances. He was grieving, after a significant loss and a transition to a life as a solo dad.
True to character, today Paul is relaxed and cheerful, though he really shouldn’t be – he and his fiancé Julia have family arriving imminently for their wedding the coming weekend.
But he does love talking business.
For Paul, property development and the environment are two entirely reconcilable concepts. Their business provides the Robinsons with an opportunity to create spaces people love to be in and that reduce the environmental impact of the buildings and the industries located within them.
Climate change poses a significant threat to low-lying and coastal urban infrastructure, including commercial and industrial property. These are the buildings in which we work, create, shop, eat out, live and play.
Paul Robinson on the banks of Te Awa Kairangi.
The Robinson siblings, property owners Sam, Paul, Cathy and Meredith, consider ethics and the environment in their decision-making matrix. They favour modern, eco-friendly builds and they retrofit character buildings to improve efficiencies in water, waste and energy. They see the risks of climate change on the horizon. The family are flexing their adaptive muscles on a new purchase in Lower Hutt’s Seaview, a landscape with multiple hazards. This part of the coastline faces the risks of liquefaction and tsunami in the event of an earthquake, flooding from Te Awa Kairangi (the Hutt River) in heavy rain, and will be among the first of Wellington’s suburbs to feel the touch of our rising tides. How the property, as well as the family business, plans for and responds to exceptional, climate-driven weather, will determine the impact these events have on the family’s livelihood, as well as the lives and livelihoods of their tenants and surrounding communities.
And as once-exceptional events become more common, the way we as a nation build climate knowledge and climate resilience into our infrastructure planning, economy and political system will determine whether they are somewhat of an inconvenience, or utterly disastrous. The Robinsons hope their experience and track record have prepared them for their latest challenge. But will triggers and forces beyond their control derail their plans and dreams?
Port Road and Other Exceptional Weather Events
The family’s latest acquisition is a large industrial park on Port Road. The area was once at the centre of New Zealand’s car manufacturing industry and is still chockfull of heavy industry. Most of the park is leased to a steel tube manufacturer, and a serious array of equipment and products are spread across multiple factory floors. The weather’s dramatic when we arrive. Clouds rush through a metallic sky. Rain hits us in sharp bursts. It’s weirdly warm. Port Road is jostled between low-lying Petone and the narrow coastal strip of Eastbourne (which is periodically cut off from adjacent suburbs by slips). The whole coastline groans when storms and heavy rainfall coincide with spring or high tides.
The morning radio bulletin warns of a storm brewing on the West Coast of the South Island. By midday, it’s been termed an “exceptional rain event” and a state of emergency has been declared in the Westland District Council area from Hokitika to Haast. The road between Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers is closed, and as the day wears on, more slips cause further closures from Makarora to Hokitika, trapping several tourists.
According to reports from NIWA, rain gauges at Milford Sound recorded 357 mm of rainfall in 24 hours, a third of Wellington’s annual rainfall, the sixth wettest day since records began, and the biggest weather event in 20 years. Rivers rose suddenly causing stop banks to burst, and a key bridge on State Highway 6 was washed away.
The extreme weather brought human tragedy, too.
The Cascading Impacts of Climate Change
Weeks later, the event feels eerily like “life imitating research.” The floods took out bridges and roads, cutting off local communities and, for a short time, the main route between Canterbury and the West Coast. Both freight and passenger rail services were cancelled and tourism was hit heavily. Farmers lost precious crops. A disused landfill site was breached. Built on the banks of the Fox River, water sluiced tonnes of rubbish, including hazardous material, out into the river and across 300 kilometres of pristine coastline. Resource that would normally be focussed on such a massive clean-up was initially diverted to the disaster itself.
It will be months and years before the full range of climate impacts can be quantified (though the Westland District Council are already expecting a big clean-up bill). But while the West Coast is nothing if not resilient, as a society we’re not very good at understanding how increasingly frequent weather events “cascade” to affect our wider social and economic activities. We need to get better at understanding the impact of cumulative weather events in the context of a changing climate.
Research led by the Victoria University of Wellington’s Judy Lawrence, “Cascading impacts and implications for Aotearoa New Zealand,” describes exactly the kind of scenario that unfolded on the West Coast. But Lawrence also asks us to imagine what might happen if people are more frequently dislocated from their homes, businesses or communities. She suggests that with repeated flooding, frustration is likely to build, and the cost and disruption of repeated evacuations will cause some services (as well as businesses) to withdraw. She paints a picture of a slowly evolving “natural disaster,” akin to the Christchurch earthquakes, where whole suburbs may well be abandoned, leaving behind vulnerable citizens with nowhere to go.
The research draws on the Circle tool (Critical Infrastructures: Relations and Consequences for Life and Environment), developed by Deltares, a research institute in the Netherlands. The tool helps users identify interdependencies between infrastructure systems. Lawrence hopes it will enable local and regional councils to understand and explore climate impacts that spill from the physical quickly into the social, economic and political spheres. “Unless we do this properly,” Lawrence says, “and if we keep responding only to single impacts and ignoring the cumulative stress and the costs of multiple impacts, our adaptation choices will simply be insufficient. Improving our literacy in how climate change impacts compound and cascade will support more successful adaptation.”
Unless we do this properly, and if we keep responding only to single impacts and ignoring the cumulative stress and the costs of multiple impacts, our adaptation choices will simply be insufficient. Improving our literacy in how climate change impacts compound and cascade will support more successful adaptation.
Judy Lawrence
The Robinsons are applying similar (though more contained) analyses to their own infrastructure. And – as for local and regional councils – tailored information is available that can help them understand the changing risk profile of their immediate environment.
NIWA’s Ryan Paulik, for example, is leading a Deep South Challenge project analysing flood risk across every river in New Zealand and mapping that risk against infrastructure. His research findings will be made available on the open source platform RiskScape (jointly developed by NIWA and GNS Science).
Patrick Walsh, of Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, is looking more closely at the flood mitigation schemes operated by councils. His research notes that New Zealanders are increasingly moving in to urban, flood-prone areas, yet at the same time, our aging flood-mitigation schemes may be insufficient for future risk. This research is exploring both the costs and benefits of such schemes, in an effort to identify possible improvements in the system.
Tomorrow When the War Began
Back at Port Road, where the storm did not develop into the major event suffered by the West Coast, Paul Robinson and his siblings Cathy, Sam and Meredith, along with their business manager Edith, have donned their armour – hot pink hi-vis vests – to introduce us to their modern war in the built environment. “World War E” is the family’s war on water, waste and energy. It’s their overarching strategy to improve the performance of their commercial properties.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul’s thinking echoes some of the ideas being developed and implemented in the Netherlands, where there’s the strong understanding that we must work with, rather than against, water. “There’s a lot of talk around retreating from the edge,” says Paul. But in the short-term, at least, the Robinsons plan to work on the border between property and water. “I think there is a lot we can do to embrace the coast,” he says.
For the family, 2019 is a year for reconnaissance and assessing baselines. “First,” Paul says, “we’re looking at the three waters – drinking water, stormwater and wastewater – then at what’s happening with energy, and finally what’s happening with waste for each property.” When the family took ownership of Port Road, they assessed the property’s storm and wastewater infrastructure.
“There’s a lot of talk around retreating from the edge… I think there is a lot we can do to embrace the coast.
Paul Robinson
“We think that’s where the immediate problems lie,” says Paul.
“We purchased these buildings knowing there was a risk of inundation from extreme weather events, and we know that risk is probably going to get worse. So, we need to understand the stormwater system really well, and to make sure it’s immaculate. Tenants have been concerned about water coming up through the manholes,” he notes wryly, “which is never ideal.” Paul explains how engineers have already removed five tonnes of gravel from the underground pipes that discharge directly into the Hutt River, which has been eye-opening. “We quickly realised that these stormwater drains have probably never been maintained. Probably, most [property owners] don’t maintain their drains. It’s only if something blocks that people have a look, but there’s a lot of preventative maintenance that can be done.”
Dealing with storm and wastewater is a priority for the family. “We’d like to avoid filling up the Wellington Harbour with brown flush after a wet day,” he laughs, not without irony. Unfortunately, while graphic, such an image is not uncommon along our coastline, particularly in urban or peri-urban coastal areas. Even in Paul’s affluent hometown of Plimmerton, the stormwater system can’t cope in heavy rain and the smell around the stormwater outlet pipes is unpleasant, to say the least.
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 trials of climate change, from sea level rise to changes in rainfall frequency and intensity.
A Deep South Dialogue, held in late 2017, brought together water sector representatives with relevant researchers, to explore how climate change will affect our storm and wastewater networks, and to identify critical gaps in our knowledge about them. The resulting dialogue report noted that sea level rise will affect all coastal water infrastructure and will likely result in increasing sewage overflows, the infiltration of wastewater into saltwater, the corrosion of pipes by salt water, and exposure to liquefaction. As many of our water networks rely on gravity to discharge into rivers or the ocean, sea level rise may cause them to fail. Coastal storms may cause electrical failure at treatment plants.
And drought will also affect networks, interfering with gravity systems by slowing flow, leading to blocked pipes. It’s not a comforting picture. The challenges are immense and magnified by the reality that – like the pipes under Port Road – our water infrastructure is in places aging and poorly maintained.
The failure of water infrastructure has obvious and not-so-obvious implications for human health, ecological systems, cultural and recreational spaces, and for our drinking water supply. To create a successful adaptation plan – to make good decisions about maintaining, replacing or upgrading our water infrastructure – we need to understand these direct and indirect risks. We need to be able to imagine the consequences of each decision or indecision.
By looking at this specific network of infrastructure, and working backwards from an “ideal” future, James Hughes of Tonkin+Taylor is trying to discover the performance we require of our storm and wastewater systems in a changed climate. His research project, “Stormwater, wastewater and climate change,” intends to show which types of economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts are likely to be the most serious, and where they might emerge. “We’re aiming to highlight likely hot spots over the short-, medium- and long-term,” Hughes explains. The research will ultimately provide guidance for local government and water sector decision-makers, who are trying to build affordable resilience into our water infrastructure, in the face of future uncertainty.
Paul Robinson makes his feelings on the subject clear. “We’re sitting around in the towns, pointing at the dairy farmers and saying, ‘You bastards, you’re polluting the rivers’. Well, we’re doing exactly the same thing to the Porirua and Wellington Harbours… I think we need to take the plank out of our own eye, before we try and take the speck out of theirs. That might be a good starting point for taking action and moving forward.”
Waterworld
The Robinsons are also looking at ways to detain and retain water onsite. “There are really, really good ideas for harbourside property,” Paul says. “At the moment, greenery is not really valued by owners or occupiers. Let’s make sure we green these sites as much as we can – let’s make them as porous as we can.” Porous surfaces are key to managing excess water in storms and floods. Paul points to the pavement and curb bordering the Port Road property. “If we’re just parking cars,” he says, “let’s see if we can park them on porous surfaces. As the asphalt wears out and requires repair, my thinking is, instead of repairing it, let’s replace it with something better.”
These ideas take Paul somewhat out of the realm of current Deep South Challenge research, but hint towards future research that’s as relevant to the Deep South Challenge as it is to related National Science Challenges (NSCs), like Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities, or Resilience to Nature’s Hazards. The NSCs are keenly aware of the need to complement each other and collaborate on research. Given that climate change has implications for every area of life, from human health to the built environment, from agriculture to technology, the NSCs know that working together is increasingly important. Challenge Director Mike Williams looks forward to a future when Deep South Challenge climate projections – both global and local – are easily accessible for researchers across all fields and areas of interest.
Paul’s optimism, his willingness to try new things, reflects the thinking in another Deep South Challenge research project. Otago University’s Janet Stephenson’s “Climate adaptation, vulnerability and community well-being.” Stephenson’s research is exploring, and documenting, recent successful attempts to engage communities about how they might need to change with our changing climate.
Based mainly in Dunedin, the research surveys council, community and iwi strategies to build resilience into the very fabric of their rohe. The breadth of practical and creative responses to climate change, in the absence of a national adaptation framework, are exciting. Dunedin City Council, for example, are well into imagining what they can do differently to cope with more frequent coastal inundation.
Maria Ioannou, Dunedin City Council’s Corporate Policy Manager, explains how the council is looking into engineering methods used overseas, bringing street gutters to the centre of the road, for example, thereby separating pedestrians and pavements from hazardous water. It’s a small but concrete example of the kinds of strategies the council, and its many communities, are considering, to embed sustainability and adaptation into the city’s regular work plan.
It’s difficult to identify exactly which factor, or “trigger,” is causing some climate-vulnerable communities to face up to climate change more quickly than others. While some communities might be motivated by the desire to take care of their most vulnerable members, others might be triggered to change by, for example, the likelihood they’ll lose insurance at some point in the next few decades.
Deep Impact: Losing Insurance in a Changing Climate
A recent announcement by IAG, New Zealand’s largest insurance group, that they will no longer be taking new business in the Wellington residential market, is the latest in a string of insurance shocks for the region. Long before the ocean laps at the front door, it may well be insurance and credit retreat that forces the hand of the Robinson’s family business.
New Zealand is an unusually well-insured country, so increased hazard risk is putting pressure on insurers, who have already begun to make changes. Lloyds Bank, an international insurance player, includes New Zealand in the top 10 risky places for natural disaster, which – along with climate change – explains why IAG (which owns State, NZI and AMI and underwrites several banking insurance products) has put its investment in Wellington on ice. Late last year, the Insurance Council announced that 2018 had been the second most expensive year for weather-related insurance claims since 1969, second only to 2017. What will the 2019 bill look like?
For a commercial operation like the Robinson’s, the issue of insurance retreat, while frustrating, has not been insurmountable. The family has been dealing with insurance woes in the commercial market since the Christchurch earthquakes, and have since abandoned local brokers and ventured offshore to deal directly with international providers. But for homeowners or small-scale property investors, the prospect of losing insurance is a much more nerve-wracking possibility. Tim Grafton, Insurance Council CEO and Chair of the Challenge’s Representative User Group, notes that the risk of insurance retreat for Seaview and Petone is unusually high.
Challenge climate risk researcher Belinda Storey explains that the key risks for coastal property owners are storminess and sea level rise. Her research project, “Climate change and the withdrawal of insurance,” notes that although we have reliable data for sea level increases over the next few decades, we have very little reliable information about how stormy our coasts will become.
Sea level rise doesn’t just threaten the coast, Belinda explains. Only a small increase in sea level rise enables storms to reach much farther inland.
“In the past,” she says, “insurers have been able to look at the historical record and determine the likelihood of a specific event happening. The problem is that now we’ve got a significant change in the risk.” Insurers are having to reassess their business models and rethink the level of risk they’re willing to bear.
I ask Belinda to give me a sense of the potential timeframes for insurance withdrawal. I don’t even finish my sentence. “Twenty years,” she says. A recent Hutt City Council report put the worst-case scenario at 30 years.
A lot of the discussion around likely climate change impacts pivots around the year 2100. We know, for example, that we’re in for one to four degrees of temperature rise by then, and between one and three metres of sea level rise. But, Belinda argues, it’s very easy for people to ignore or at least delay this kind of discussion, because 2100 feels so far away. People have difficulty planning five years in advance, let alone 80. Belinda says the loss of insurance will bring decisions that we think are far off in the future forward by 50 to 70 years. That’s 2030; 2050 if we’re very lucky.
“A good place to start is with changes we’re most confident about. We’re confident that we’re heading towards a 10cm sea level rise in the next 20 years. We can consider which locations in New Zealand are going to be hit earliest and hardest… which brings us to Wellington. One problem for Wellington is that it also has a low tidal range, meaning that when storm surge comes, there’s more chance it’ll be bigger than a high tide.”
We’re confident that we’re heading towards a 10cm sea level rise in the next 20 years. We can consider which locations in New Zealand are going to be hit earliest and hardest… which brings us to Wellington.
Belinda Storey
There are already places in New Zealand where insurance has become unavailable, but it’s difficult to access that information. Private insurers know who they’re turning down, but researchers and society at large do not have access to this information. Owners may not realise until they go to sell the property that their buyer can’t get insurance.
Belinda’s research is using actuarial analysis to predict which locations are likely to lose insurance. “The thing about insurance is that if you lose it, you don’t want to tell anyone, the insurer doesn’t want to tell anyone, and the council sometimes doesn’t want to tell anyone either… You’ve got all parties wanting to brush it under the carpet, then potential buyers won’t really know either, which is not a good long-term outcome for anyone.”
“There are places in the world that require insurers to notify the regulator when they decline insurance, but we don’t have that here,” says Belinda, who would like to see more information made publicly accessible. Belinda believes that applying this model in New Zealand could make a significant difference to public planning, and would enable society to consider how the risk is changing.
So who bears responsibility for risk in all of this? Whether development is large-scale coastal or riverside property, or a beach side family bach, it’s all forging changes in the infrastructure on our coastline. Decisions are being made within the frameworks set by local and central government.
And according to Deep South Challenge researcher Lisa Ellis, from the University of Otago, within our current framework, “individual members of our most vulnerable communities will bear the burden of risks they could not have foreseen.”
“If we do not take action,” Ellis argues, “we can expect delayed, expensive and uneven responses to these new natural hazards; reactive responses to challenges that could have been mitigated or prevented; emergency measures imposed from above rather than community-led long-range planning; missed opportunities to enjoy the co-benefits accruing from long-term adaptation planning; and overall, a transfer of risk from the least to the most vulnerable.”
Ellis’s Challenge project, “How should the risks of sea-level rise be shared?” has found that for any new build in risky locations, “the government – that is, effectively, everyone – will be expected to cover losses for development that is already predictably risky.”
There’s no current international best practice for climate adaptation. If we do this well, there are substantial co-benefits society-wise, especially for achieving equitable outcomes. So, let’s think of it as an opportunity.
Lisa Ellis
Ellis and her research team concluded that, “The most important immediate step New Zealand can take toward an ethically robust sea-level rise policy is to bring certainty and consistency into the legislative framework.” They also argued that there needs to be wider consideration given to the ethics and values we want to follow as we adapt, to ensure that the highest costs of climate change are not transferred to the most vulnerable. “There’s no current international best practice for climate adaptation,” Ellis said, in a recent Deep South Challenge online seminar. “If we do this well,” she continued, “there are substantial co-benefits society-wise, especially for achieving equitable outcomes. So, let’s think of it as an opportunity.”
The Day After Tomorrow
After their water and waste audit, the Robinsons will turn their attention to the question of energy. The Port Road buildings consume $240,000 worth of energy a year. An initial audit identified the potential to save over $100,000 worth of electricity per year, by doing relatively simple things like replacing or modifying the site’s transformers. “We’ll also go through and replace over a hectare or so of high bay metal fluoride lighting with LED,” Paul says. But the final stage of the Robinson family’s World War E will be a change in the way they organise themselves. In the future, instead of “property manager,” Paul would like to shift into environmental management, communicating the priorities of their business. “All of a sudden, renewing leases and fixing leaking roofs [will become] ancillary to environmental and social management.”
There may well be a metaphor in here for the way we need to change our collective thinking in relation to our stewardship of our built environment in a changing climate.
“My brother Sam and I started a company in the mid-1990s and bought the old Briscoes building in Porirua,” now the site of the very popular Peppermill Café. “Our first goal, all those years ago, was based around one simple question. ‘How do we get this business to a sustainable level… to ensure it’s resilient against economic shock.’”
A building is inherently humans + infrastructure. Buildings provide for people and livelihoods, and should primarily consider the people who work, live and socialise within them. Protecting both the past and the future is a challenge the Robinsons are willing to tackle. A few decades on, their business is thriving, with eight large commercial properties in their portfolio, including Porirua’s first Greenstar building.
They also own the Woolstore Design Centre on Wellington’s Thorndon Quay, which has been designed to bring people together, through great social spaces, excellent food and an impressive collection of New Zealand art. “It gives the place a spirit,” Paul says.
There are many parallels between the kind of planning the Robinson family are considering and the questions that councils and central government must consider in their policy development. Adaptation must take not just hard infrastructure into account but must ensure that the future we plan for is built for human communities and enables us to thrive.
Don’t underestimate the risk… Make your decisions considering that the extremes could happen, because at some point they will.
Belinda Storey
At the most basic level, however, Belinda’s advice for homeowners and property developers alike, is clear, “Don’t underestimate the risk… Make your decisions considering that the extremes could happen, because at some point they will.”
This story first appeared in Kia Urutau | Adapt, the May 2019 magazine of the Deep South Challenge.
Kia hiwa rā! We are holding our 2nd Deep South Challenge conference on the Auckland Viaduct, May 6-8, 2019.
The 2nd Deep South Challenge Conference: “Changing with our Climate” will be held in Auckland:
Researcher only days: Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th May
Partner, stakeholder and researcher day: Wednesday 8th May
Expressions of interest to attend our conference have closed. We’ll be issuing formal invitations over the next few weeks. If you didn’t express your interest but would still like to attend, please email: [email protected]
To bring you our “Changing with our Climate” conference, we are proudly partnering with the NZ Maritime Museum and the Auckland Council.
It’s hard to believe the time that has passed since participants met in Wellington to share ideas and experiences about communicating climate change.
For the Challenge engagement team, it feels like yesterday. We’re pleased to be able to bring those of you who couldn’t be there a vibrant report of the event, which was captured in live illustration, photography, audio, by scribe and later, in evaluations.
The report is our attempt to capture the day – in words, images, quotes and tweets. We hope it triggers and stimulates ideas and commitments in relation to the way we talk about climate change and adapting to climate change.
It’s the perfect time to release this report, on the eve of our 2019 conference, “Changing with our Climate”. We have tried to apply many of the lessons that shine through brightly in this document to our conference programme.
If you would like a physical copy of the booklet, please let the Challenge engagement team know.
