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Give us your two-pagers by February 19, 2021

In recent years, the policy landscape for climate adaptation in Aotearoa has shifted dramatically. There is also growing recognition that stakeholders and end users require methods and tools that help them make decisions despite uncertainty about the future. 

Our mission is to enable New Zealanders to anticipate, adapt, manage risk and thrive in a changing climate. To date, our comprehensive research portfolio has helped us deliver on “anticipating” the nature and magnitude of the challenges ahead, and the urgency with which action needs to be taken.

We are now increasing our focus on the second part of our mission statement, and are asking for your research ideas as the first stage of a new Impacts and Implications funding round, “Living with Uncertainty.”

We recognise that, as a “climate adaptation” science challenge, it’s incumbent upon us to be adaptive! We are up for the challenge of changing, not just with our climate, but with the needs of our communities, in line with expert advice from adaptation researchers.

We are looking to fund projects that either:

• Work with end users or stakeholders on implementing adaptation approaches, where possible utilising existing research, or
• Develop or apply approaches to support decision making under uncertainty. 

This funding round will follow a two-stage process:

• Stage One: Interested researchers provide a brief outline of their research idea/s, using the template provided. 
  The Challenge, and key stakeholders, will review research ideas to identify those which clearly address either of the priority areas, have new or existing teams which could credibly conduct the research, and correspond with research needs already identified by stakeholders.
• Stage Two: Based on the research ideas we receive, the Challenge will develop an RfP, and invite a small number of research teams to develop full research proposals.
  In this stage, we may suggest that researchers combine forces, or that particular researchers work with specific or general stakeholder groups. This may include limited funding and support for co-development.
   

More information, including a very brief template for researchers to use when considering your research ideas, are all available at this section of our website here: 
https://www.deepsouthchallenge.co.nz/funding-opportunities

Research ideas are due back with us well after the holiday period, on February 19, 2021.

What does climate change mean for our house insurance?

Constant Change seminar with Belinda Storey

Climate change is a slow-moving disaster that will affect all communities across Aotearoa. It might hit some of us this year, or in the next 10 years, or it might eventually take out a home we have deep historical attachment to.

Worsening coastal hazards are not yet fully reflected in homeowners’ decisions to purchase, develop or renovate coastal property. New Zealand is also still building new residential developments in climate-risky locations.

What does this mean for our house insurance?

Within our four largest cities, at least 10,000 houses currently sit within a 1-in-100-year coastal flood zone. Nationally, around 450,000 houses are within 1km of the coast. These homes are likely to be affected by more frequent and intense storms and by sea level rise. In this seminar, Belinda Storey (Climate Sigma) will take you through her much-anticipated research into “Climate change and the withdrawal of insurance.”

A recording of this seminar will be available on our YouTube channel in the days following this seminar. Please subscribe to stay up-to-date.

Webinar with Catherine Iorns

One of the key trends in domestic and international climate litigation is in trying to establish who is liable for taking (or not taking) adaptation measures.

There have been at least 19 court challenges in Aotearoa to council decisions on adaptation to sea level rise. Currently, councils have a lot of leeway in their approaches to climate hazard risks, including sea-level rise. Court action across the nation is testing the limits of council authority, and showing up gaps in the legislative and policy environment.

And even though leeway exists for councils, some of their options will incur larger future liability costs than others. Further, some councils –  at least some of those involved in making adaptation decisions – appear to be unaware of the extent of their possible liability.

In this seminar, Catherine Iorns (Victoria University of Wellington) will take you through one aspect of her broad-ranging research into “Sea level rise, housing and insurance: Liability and compensation”.

In her much-anticipated Deep South Challenge research report, Insurance Retreat, Belinda Storey (Climate Sigma) attempts to look to the future, to ask how the insurance sector will respond to the ever-increasing impacts of climate change.

Within our four largest cities, at least 10,000 houses currently sit within a 1-in-100-year coastal flood zone. Nationally, around 450,000 houses are within 1km of the coast. These homes are likely to be affected by more frequent and intense storms and by sea level rise. One reason is that sea level rise allows storm surges to reach further inland.

Just 10cm of sea-level rise in Wellington, for example, will change the probability of a flood event by five times. That is, an event that might have occurred once every 100 years will soon occur every 20 years. But worsening coastal hazards are not yet fully reflected in homeowners’ decisions to purchase, develop or renovate coastal property. New Zealand is also still building new residential developments in climate-risky locations.

“People tend to be very good at ignoring low-probability events,” Storey says. “This has been noticed internationally, even when there is significant risk facing a property. Although these events, such as flooding, are devastating, the low probability makes people think they’re a long way off.”

But how are insurance companies in Aotearoa New Zealand likely to respond? Will they be as relaxed about risk as homeowners? That’s unlikely.

International experience and anecdotal evidence from those in the industry suggest that companies start pulling out of insuring properties at around 2% AEP. By 5% AEP, insurance is completely unavailable. That is, insurance companies withdraw insurance from an area when disasters (like floods) begin to occur between every 50 to 20 years. This is probably a conservative estimate.

If the probability of your hazard increases five-fold, from 1% to 5% AEP, your premium and/or excess will go up and you’ll find it increasingly difficult to renew your insurance for that hazard.

In this research, Storey analyses extreme sea levels for the Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin coastlines. Her findings indicate that homes that might currently flood only once every 100 years are likely to experience insurance retreat over the next 15 years:

To accompany the release of this research, the Deep South Challenge has published an accessible factsheet for homeowners, “Your Questions Answered: House Insurance & Climate Change.”

In this webinar, our Vision Mātauranga programme lead, Associate Professor Sandy Morrison (University of Waikato), will be speaking about her Deep South Challenge research project Te Tai Uka a Pia. The webinar is part of a series organised by the rōpū rangahau Māori in Antarctica, which sets a wero to think about how Māori and indigenous knowledges can strengthen the global collective approach to Antarctic science, policy and governance.

We’re delighted to share news of this webinar event organised by the Vision Mātauranga rōpū rangahau of the Ross RAMP project.

Sandy Morrison (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Maniapoto; Ngāti Rārua ki te Tau Ihu, Ngāti Tama ki te Waipounamu) and Aimee Kaio (Ngāi Tahu, Tuhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāpuhi) will speak about their imminent research Iwi relationships with the Southern and Antarctic Oceans (August 2020). The research documents Māori narratives of voyaging and mātauranga of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

According to the tribal narratives of Ngāti Rārua and Te Āti Awa, the first human to travel to the Antarctic was the Polynesian explorer Hui Te Rangiora.

Hui Te Rangiora sits aloft the meeting house Tūrangapeke, at Te Awhina marae in Motueka. He gazes out in his continual search for new lands, and in this way his journey is remembered and honoured. Te Rangiora also adorns the Pou at the entrance to the Riuwaka Resurgence in Kahurangi National Park. At this place,  he took rest and prepared himself spiritually and physically for his journey into the Southern Ocean.

This is one recorded version of Māori journeying into the Southern Ocean. But what other stories are held by hapū and iwi – especially those from Te Waipounamu (the South Island) and Rekohu (the Chatham Islands)? How might these stories frame our ongoing relationship with the Antarctic and our adaptation responses to climate change?

In this project, Sandy and Aimee worked with hapū and iwi from Te Waipounamu and Rekohu to better understand the extent and nature of the relationships Māori had with the Antarctic and Southern Oceans, and to identify local challenges associated with climate change through both tribal stories and contemporary living arrangements.

Recent and ongoing drought in Auckland and Northland highlights how vulnerable New Zealand’s water infrastructure is. We haven’t yet hit Day Zero – as happened in South Africa when Cape Town ran out of drinking water – but the spectre of thirsty people and thirsty paddocks looms large.

So is our infrastructure planning up to the task? And are our planners making the smartest possible investment decisions, given that water availability under climate change is critical but also uncertain? 

Can our dams and reservoirs be designed with both climate projections and flexibility into the projects’ very foundations? The short answer is, yes. In this seminar, Anita Wreford (Lincoln University) and Wageed Kamish (Tonkin+Taylor) will take you through their research projects, which address different aspects of these questions: Making robust decisions about New Zealand’s water and Drinking water, drought and climate change.

Anita’s research has tested a method for designing flexibility into large climate adaptation projects. Called Real Options Analysis (ROA), the method is useful across a range of investment decisions in New Zealand, where the initial cost is large and the investment is at least partially irreversible. 

Using the case study of an on-farm irrigation scheme, Anita’s multidisciplinary team – including hydrologists, economists and farm specialists – considers that ROA enables more cost-effective investment than cost-benefit analysis, for example, or other methods that use only a single climate scenario.

Wageed’s research investigates the drinking water risks that urban and rural communities would be exposed to under “yet to occur droughts” due to climate change. These risks have not, until now, been quantified. As in Anita’s project, Wageed’s team developed and tested new methods for quantifying this risk. The team’s work represents a first substantial step towards the development of a practical, transparent way of assessing the potential impact of climate change on reservoir and catchment yields for water supply. 

This seminar is the first in our new-look, Covid-era Constant Change seminar series. We hope you’ll join us online from home, from your office or from the waiting room of a Covid-testing facility, to make sure we keep climate change at the forefront of planning and investment in this time of global pandemic.

The Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate is humbled and excited that its Kāhui Māori have agreed to share their knowledge with the Antarctic Science Platform, and to act as its Kāhui Māori (Māori advisory group) as well.

Kāhui Māori members Sandy Morrison, Darren Ngaru King, Aimee Kaio, Shaun Awatere, Naomi Simmonds and Ruia Aperahama bring an immense amount of experience to this leadership body, and will support both our organisations to be and do better for Māori communities, including Māori researchers.

The Deep South Challenge, while increasingly focussed on climate impacts in Aotearoa, and on supporting communities in Aotearoa to adapt to climate change, builds on a core of Antarctic research. Antarctic processes are poorly represented in global climate models, and this continues to be a huge focus of our modelling programme. We are trying to improve our understanding of sea ice, clouds and ocean in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean region.

A foundational research project is also led by Sandy Morrison (University of Waikato), our Vision Mātauranga programme lead, and Chair of the Kāhui Māori. Sandy’s work is uncovering new information about early Polynesian and Māori exploration to the Southern Ocean. Her research supports communities to consider not just our capacity to adapt to new environments, but the tikanga that has always underpinned processes of great change.

The Kāhui Māori is crucial to ensure that the principles of kaupapa Māori research are upheld in our organisations, and support our non-Māori research to improve its practice as well.

Antarctic Science Platform Director Nancy Bertler says the Platform is delighted with the new partnership. “We are privileged to be able to share the Kāhui’s wealth of knowledge and work closely with our friends and colleagues at the Deep South Challenge.”

Sandy Morrison says that with the first Platform hui already completed, the Kāhui is poised to begin discussions on how to ensure Antarctic science is both cognisant of and increasingly grounded in mātauranga Māori.

“Antarctica is a barometer for New Zealand and the globe, in terms of climate change signals and consequences,” Sandy says. “Solving problems as complex as climate change requires multiple knowledges. There is an historic under-representation of Māori in modern research conducted in the Antarctic and Southern Oceans. It is important to raise the status of mātauranga Māori in climate change science, and to incorporate it into discussions about adaptation to climate change. It is also crucial that we uphold the mana of this sacred place.”

Upcoming Sandy Morrison webinar: Māori in Antarctica
On Monday 27 July at 3pm, Sandy Morrison will be presenting a seminar about her Deep South Challenge research, Te Tai Uka a Pia. The research documents Māori narratives of voyaging and gathers together mātauranga around the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, including to inform future adaptation challenges. Register here: https://maoriantarctica.org/online-seminars/

The significant effort to develop and run New Zealand’s own Earth System Model (NZESM), within the Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate, is leading to more realistic climate simulations for New Zealand.

The major step forward is described in a paper recently published in the Journal of Advances in Earth System Modelling, co-authored by Erik Behrens and Olaf Morgenstern (both of NIWA).

Lead author and ocean modeller Erik Behrens explains how the oceans around New Zealand have to-date been poorly represented in global climate models. “Our unique oceanic currents and conditions have a major impact on the climate in our region,” he says, “and unless we capture these processes well in our climate models, we can’t fully trust our future climate projections.”

Our unique oceanic currents and conditions have a major impact on the climate in our region, and unless we capture these processes well in our climate models, we can’t fully trust our future climate projections.

“The key here is to resolve small-scale oceanic processes, such as oceanic eddies,” continues Behrens. “The oceans around New Zealand are full of these eddies.” Oceanic currents in the real world don’t flow smoothly, like in a Disney Pixar animation. They’re more like rivers with sections of wild rapids, which create small-scale eddies.

“There’s a hotspot of eddies along the Australian coast – within the East Australian Current,” Behrens explains. “South of about Sydney, this current becomes unstable and generates very intense eddies. Some of these eddies form the Tasman Front, which carries warm water towards New Zealand, while others transport water into the Tasman Sea. Small-scale eddies dominate the transport of heat throughout the ocean, and drive mixing in the ocean (including of nutrient supplies). Both ocean heat and ocean biology play a major role in climate and climate change.

Behrens, Morgenstern and others have been able to “tweak” the ocean model component of the NZ’s earth system model. The results show improved simulations of New Zealand’s present-day ocean temperatures, salinity and currents, and therefore of our ocean bio-geochemistry. Our New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM), which builds on the UK Earth System Model (UKESM), also does a better job of simulating oceanic climate extremes in our region, such as marine heatwaves.

Last year (2019) saw marine heatwaves of 6°C above average. The UKESM underestimated these heatwaves by roughly 1°C. In general, it simulates milder ‘extremes’ and colder oceans around New Zealand than in the real world.

Small-scale eddies also influence large-scale ocean circulation, such as ocean gyres and the strong currents in the Southern Ocean. These large ocean currents transfer heat to the air, impacting our Southern Hemisphere climate.

We clearly need to be able to accurately model how these processes are changing over time, in order to prepare for our climate future. With the NZESM capturing present-day conditions around New Zealand better than our UK counterpart, we can have more confidence in our future predictions.

The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Advances in Earth System Modelling, as “Local Grid Refinement in New Zealand’s Earth System Model: Tasman Sea Ocean Circulation Improvements and Super-Gyre Circulation Implications”.

Weather-related hazards have already cost the EQC $450 million in (inflation adjusted) payouts since the year 2000. New research by Jacob Pastor-Paz, Ilan Noy, Isabelle Sin, Abha Sood, David Fleming-Munoz and Sally Owen has found that climate change, and the expected increase in intensity and frequency of extreme weather-related events, is likely to translate into higher damages and thus an additional financial liability for the EQC.

“Our research shows that EQC should plan for future payouts for weather-related damage to be between 9% and 25% higher than current payouts,” said Prof Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters at Victoria University of Wellington and one of the authors of the paper.

“We used past detailed insurance claims data together with climate projections in order to project future monetary losses from damages caused by extreme events under different climate change scenarios,” said Prof Noy. “To get to that point we analysed more than 8,000 claims lodged to the EQC between 2000 and 2017. “

The level of increase in insurance liabilities is dependent on the level of future greenhouse gasses (GHG) that will be emitted, globally.

The model identifies a ‘climate signal,’ based on the percent change between projected and past damages. It rises from an increase of between 7% and 8% in 2020-40 to an increase of between 9% and 25% in 2080-2100, depending on the projected GHG concentration scenario.  

For a future low emissions scenario, the climate signal, and therefore the expected change in damages, actually decreases toward the end of the century, when GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are assumed to decrease. In contrast, a scenario that uses the highest-emissions forecast sees the climate signal more than doubling between 2020-2040 and 2080-2100.

“The increase we have projected in the public insurer’s liabilities can also inform private insurers and regulators,” said Prof Ilan Noy. “Whether this increase necessitates a change to the amount of premiums the EQC collects annually, or in the types of risks it insures, are questions for future research and policy decisions.”

New Zealand’s population, and its residential building stock value, has been steadily growing over the past few decades. This suggests that future liabilities may be higher than what we predict.

The Motu Working Paper, “Projecting the effect of climate change-induced increases in extreme rainfall on residential property damages: A case study from New Zealand”  by Jacob Pastor-Paz, Ilan Noy, Isabelle Sin, Abha Sood, David Fleming-Munoz and Sally Owen, co-funded by the Deep South Challenge and the Earthquake Commission (EQC), is now available.

The team’s full suite of working papers is available at their project page here: https://www.deepsouthchallenge.co.nz/projects/extreme-weather-climate-change-eqc

Just how prepared is Aotearoa’s highly valuable tourism sector for the coming impacts of climate change? The answer is similar to most sectors of New Zealand society: not nearly prepared enough. And yet, some aspects of tourism – its emphasis on place and stories of place, its connection to values such as manaakitanga, whānautanga and kaitiakitanga – provide tourism operators with a ready-made planning guide, as they consider how to climate-proof their operation.

In this seminar, presenters Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi (University of Waikato) will take you through their new research report, Centring Culture in Public Engagement on Climate Adaptation: Re-shaping the Future of the NZ Tourism Sector. 

In many ways, tourism presents us with a microcosm of the intersecting challenges all sectors face in relation to climate adaptation. Like other sectors, tourism is made up of multiple small-to-medium-size enterprises, many of whom don’t feel they have the resources to invest in long-term planning, or the ability to influence local or central government investment decisions around infrastructure and the natural environment. The lack of a national adaptation framework and funding, an uncertain regulatory environment and the pressures of day-to-day operations mean that climate adaptation is low on the list of priorities for many tourism businesses. Nevertheless, recent local and global events reiterate yet again how vulnerable the tourism sector is and will increasingly be to the impacts of climate change.  

Still, tourism can take the lead in showing others how to adapt to our changing climate – including by planning from and leading with culture. Tourism, by its very nature, rests on the four ‘pillars’ of culture identified in this research: place, values, power and narrative. Tourism operators already understand the imperative to operate sustainably, and are very often champions for their local environments. By integrating climate information into the stories they tell about their place; by making sure these stories and any development plans are aligned with core values of care for people and nature; and by understanding how they can exercise power in shaping sustainable tourism, operators can future-proof their businesses from the emerging impacts of climate change.

The report also finds that there is a critical need to increase operators’ awareness of relevant climate information, include about changing temperatures, extreme weather, floods and droughts, and the impact these are having on marine, coastal, river and alpine environments. Operators need better information about local impacts on flora and fauna, pest and disease profiles, and the relationship of climate impacts to air travel (for example, about the future reluctance or inability of tourists to travel to New Zealand).

Debashish and Priya’s work in this project leads on from their Climate Futures project (with Kum-Kum Bhavnani and John Foran of the University of California at Santa Barbara), funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

Our presenters will be joining us live online from the London School of Economics.
 

Physical hubs: 

• NIWA Wellington: Allen Building, 3rd Floor meeting room
• NIWA Lauder: Computer Room
• NIWA Christchurch: TerraNova Room
• University of Canterbury: Level 7 Meeting Room, Julius Von Haast Building
• University of Otago: Room 312, Department of Physics, Science III Building

Please note, all visitors to NIWA must sign in on arrival.

We encourage you to set up your own hub and bring colleagues together to participate in the seminar. Please let us know if you do set up your own hub and would like to test your VC facility prior to the seminar.

Email: [email protected]