'Tough conversations' needed on climate adaptation in NZ

An expert has weighed in on the ability of towns like Westport to adapt to climate change.

A state of emergency was declared in the Buller District last week after heavy rain saw parts of the region flood and slips close roads.

A quarter of Westport had spent Thursday night in welfare centres due to the wild weather.

To make matters worse for residents, they had been forced out of their homes by flooding six days earlier.

The district had also suffered after flooding in July last year, in an extreme weather event also dubbed a one-in-100-year event.

Belinda Storey of Climate Sigma, which looks at pricing climate risk, told Breakfast tough conversations needed to be had about towns like Westport.

Climate change adaptation was needed, she said.

“Trying to hold back the Buller in full flood is a fool’s errand.

“We need to be thinking about really difficult decisions about whether we can continue to fight against nature and hold it back, or whether we need to be making decisions about people moving.”

Storey explained Westport was exposed to the coast, had a significant river nearby and was surrounded by water courses.

She said a number of houses had been red and yellow stickered due to repeated floods and said a question hovered over houses being rebuilt — are they going to be able to get insurance?

Storey explained in places like Westport, the probability of one-in-100-year events occurring “is going up significantly”.

She explained people may think one-in-100-year events might not happen for 100 years, but it means the probability each year of it happening is about one per cent.

Asked on Breakfast last week what could be done to prevent residents having to sandbag their homes and flee to keep themselves safe, Buller Mayor Jamie Cleine said: “No one can live like that, can they? At the heart of all of this is people’s property and livelihoods, safety and welfare. No one likes doing what we’ve had to do over the last few weeks.

“There are solutions, there is a bright future for places like Westport, but they’re going to take a bit of time and we’ve got to make sure they’re the right thing.

“I think communities like ours are never going to be able to solve all of those on their own, it’s going to take some support from Central Government and others. That’s the sort of conversations that are underway and it just has to be worked on in terms of solid flood defences, better building, better places to build, things like that as well.”

A $10 million flood protection scheme has been proposed for Westport, which could see a flood wall built around the town.

“The work can be done,” Cleine said. “There are solutions out there, it’s designing them and making sure they’re right and one the community can get behind and then we find a way of funding that and getting it done.”

Resident Troy Scanlon had said it had been "tiring" to have to protect his home again, putting all of the furniture up on pallets as he had six days ago.

He had only been able to move back into the house about four weeks ago, after July's flooding saw 50cm of water through his home.

Scanlon said flooding from Thursday's heavy rain had come "close enough to give us a scare".

He said residents knew there was a plan in action.

“We know it’s coming. I suppose we just need to get it underway and get it done, get it sorted just to give people the confidence again and making sure they feel safe in these events and are on the horizon.”

Storey said Climate Sigma was finding weather events in New Zealand were becoming more severe and the company had been able to model they would have not occurred without the amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere.

“What they’re finding is there is a human fingerprint on those events.”

Storey recalled the deadly floods in Germany in particular in July last year — flooding also hit the UK, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland — which had been considered a one-in-2000-year event.

Due to climate change, such an event was considered something like a one-in-300-year event now, an increase of six or seven times.

Storey said weather events the world would not have seen in recorded history were now happening in our lifetime.

“Scientists have been talking about this for such a long time and now we’re at a point where they are looking up and saying this particular event is directly related to our emissions,” she said.

For New Zealand, “real action on climate change” was needed, Storey said.

“We need to make sure we’re reducing our emissions and New Zealand’s ambition is pretty limited. It’s not going to deliver on our ambitions to date.”