Podcast: Staring into the Abyss – James Hughes, Tonkin + Taylor (edited excerpt)
Listen to the full episode here.
Ross
“What are council climate change assessments and why do councils do them?
James
"Councils do climate risk assessments for probably two or three reasons. And the first is them as an organisation understanding how climate risks can impact their core activities. For example, they might provide water, transport, parks, waste services, et cetera. They are undertaking these types of assessments to know what we need to be thinking about in terms of hazards like flooding, increased rainfall leading to more flooding, sea level rise and coastal inundation, fires drought, etcetera.
“Another reason they'll do them, is to help their communities plan, or understand in the first instance, and then try to come up with a plan to deal with, what you might call, more existential risks like increased flooding, coastal inundation and sea level rise.
“There's probably a third one as well, which is assisting parts of the community and the economy and society to understand the risks to other interests. For example, Bay of Plenty Regional Council facilitated an assessment that looked at impacts to tourism, impacts to the kiwifruit sector, impacts to the forestry sector, agriculture, horticulture, etcetera."
Ross
“I guess you could understand these assessments as part of our journey across the entire country steadily taking climate change more seriously?”
James
“Yes, I think it's interesting, right? The assessments are good at saying there's a bunch of bad stuff that councils and others should be thinking about. There's a lot of uncertainty attached with that. When you're thinking about climate risk, you need to say risk under what scenario? An ambitious decarbonization scenario or a high level of warming scenario or something in between. Each of those poses a different set of challenges for a council to think about. And that makes it very difficult to plan."
Ross
Do you get the sense that councils get a bit of a fright when they read these assessments?”
James
“Yes, and I think a lot of them, probably all of them, really struggle, and that's probably not just them. I think people in general struggle with planning, future planning full stop.”
Ross
“So what do councils, in your experience, do differently as a result of an assessment?”
James
“Number one, councils provide information to people through these assessments. And number two, councils are starting to convene community engagement processes, particularly for more exposed or at-risk communities. An example is the Clifton to Tangoio are near Napier. There's a community called Haumona and there's waves breaking into people's front living rooms on a bright sunny day. So the councils convened an ongoing community forum about understanding what the future might look like, what the options are, and then trying to agree with communities what they would like to do.”
Ross
“I suppose the big scary risk everybody thinks of immediately, is sea level rise and managed retreat?”
James
“I think every coastal council is probably grappling with that in different ways. And there are many examples around New Zealand and the world. Nw Zealand has a unique disadvantage in the sense that it is a very small population relative to the length of coastline. Take the opposite, which is somewhere like Holland. They've got a small coastline, but a huge population. As a result, their strategy is to ”protect, protect, protect” and make the levees higher and engineer their way out of the problem. We can't afford to take that approach in New Zealand.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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