When New Zealand's colonial founders built our cities and towns, they clearly lacked flooding and coastal erosion modelling in their town planning.
It is true that coastal and river-based settlements are inherently desirable in the way of accessibility for trade, fertile soil, and mahinga kai.
Moreover, there probably wasn’t a large pool of climate scientists and environmental engineers to consult at the time. But still, our early settlers' addiction to building on flood plains and swamps has made our country’s effort to adapt to a changing climate a monumental one.
The Climate Change Commission make a submission to the Finance and Expenditure Committee during the inquiry into climate adaptation Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
Climate change is a pretty ubiquitous topic in Parliament. It’s the subject of so many debates and conversations in the House, which tend to get pretty heated at the best of times.
Two decades or so ago, those debates may have contained arguments like “climate change exists and we need to stop it.”
That’s definitely still the underlying utterance or default position for so many of our MPs, but for a while now, there's been a noticeable shift in dialogue from how we can stop the climate from changing, to how on earth we can adapt to it changing.
Recent extreme weather events like Cyclone Gabrielle, and the Auckland Anniversary floods are jarring reminders that inaction would be chaotic, and adaptation is critical.
Invariably, this is an issue that transcends generations, and indeed governments. Hence the need for bi-partisan collaboration and consensus on lawmaking in this area.
Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee (FEC) is currently leading the charge on this, with an inquiry into climate adaptation.
This picks up on the Environment Committee’s inquiry on the same subject last Parliament (the term finished before the committee had the chance to report back), and is intended to be a key consideration in the development of adaptation legislation.
Accordingly, submissions are being sought from far and wide. Among them are insurance companies, regional councils, advisory bodies, and individual New Zealanders who are experiencing adaptation as an immediate issue rather than a future one.
One of those individuals is 83 year old submitter Donald Brown, who resides at the edge of Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere. He told the committee in his submission that “we don’t want to be climate change victims when we could be ‘leaders helping show other communities that face the same problems that there can be good solutions if we work together.”
Brown’s submission highlights another facet of consideration for adaptation. Much of the land used by Māori for tikanga purposes (ie. urupa - burial grounds, mahinga kai, archeological sites) is threatened. The prospect of a climate-induced managed retreat would risk severing centuries old cultural attachments to the whenua (land). “I dearly want to see out my days at the lake, continuing my mahinga kai practises and building the mātauranga to rejuvenate this lake and also build its resilience so the lake can also respond to the climate challenge.”
Time to build an ark?
As you’d expect, the committee has been hearing from relevant officials from Crown entities and ministries. On Wednesday, one of them told the FEC that adaptation “is likely to be the most difficult challenge that this country faces over the next century.”
The job of the Climate Change Commission, says Chair Dr. Rodd Carr, is to “monitor progress and adaptation to help all New Zealanders understand whether we are best dressed for the future.” Carr and his colleagues stressed to the committee the importance of widespread public understanding regarding adaptation plans. “If it is not clear to households where costs and losses lie, then they will not make the optimum choices about where to live, and what to produce, and what risks to avoid.”
Stephen Walter, who works in the Commission’s emissions budgets and adaptation division commended the collaborative nature of the inquiry.
Chloe Swarbrick listens to the submission of the Climate Change Commission Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
“We’re very grateful that the Parliament has formed this cross-party committee inquiry into an adaptation framework. It’s really important that this cross-party support is not just on the outcome that we achieve but also on the actions and measures we take in support of that outcome.”
Climate adaptation: a finance issue?
One would think that Parliament was barking up the right tree last year in allocating a climate adaptation inquiry to the Environment Committee. So why is this one being led by Finance and Expenditure? The Committee’s Chair, National MP for Kaikōura Stuart Smith, explained to The House that this wasn’t a case of mixed up in-trays.
“Ultimately, it’s a finance question,” says Smith. “These things will cost money, and the question often will come down to, where the costs fall, and who pays for them.”
Partisan tiffs and spats are omnipresent at Parliament. Ask a child about what they think Question Time is, and I’d bet money on them answering something like “the person from the blue party and the person from the red party were both shouting at each other.”
This perception is of course perpetuated by the fact that Question Time is perhaps the most widely televised and publicly visible function of Parliament.
Digression aside, select committees are a bastion of collaboration and collegiality in an environment that is otherwise pretty adversarial.
MP for Kaikōura Stuart Smith, who chairs Parliament's Finance and Expenditure Committee. Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
Smith reckons that this inquiry has been an example that cross-party kaupapa is in fact effective, and more importantly - productive. “All the parties are collaborating and actually, it’s working really well. Ultimately, even in the adaptation space, there will be things that we disagree on, along party lines, but the thing is to find the maximum amount of things we agree on, so that we can make progress. Governments come and go, and this is a long term issue, a very long term issue, so it's something we have to do."
What’s an inquiry again?
Inquiries, and their less formal variations - briefings, are a form of non-legislative business under the remit of select committees. They are either self-initiated, or the House will refer a specific issue to a committee to conduct an inquiry. The inquiry into climate adaptation is an example of the latter, with Minister for Climate Change, Simon Watts, proposing the motion of its initiation in the House.
Unlike briefings, inquiries report back to the House regarding their findings, the parameters of which are more defined in a written Terms of Reference. In this instance, these were articulated by Watts when he made the motion in the House.
This inquiry is but the tip of the proverbial (melting) iceberg in terms of the legislative and regulatory work that needs to be done in the area of climate adaptation.
The scale of the challenge, as the Climate Commission candidly told the committee this week, is enormous. It’s not just beachside baches (or cribs if you’re down south), and riverside cottages that this issue affects. Findings by both academics, and NIWA, estimate that the cost to replace dwellings in flood hazard areas would be $218 billion.
The words ‘managed retreat’ may seem pretty far-fetched for some New Zealanders, and possibly scary for others. The FEC will no doubt be wary of this. “We built most of our towns and cities on river deltas and swamps. But the question is, do we actually mitigate that now and try and stop the flooding, or do we at some point say, well - we have to retreat from that area. So we’re looking at how you come up with a framework to make those decisions. [Such as] who makes those decisions? Then [we have to] come up with a framework about who pays for those decisions,” mused Chair Stuart Smith.
You can listen to the audio for this story, along with other stories from Parliament this week, by clicking on the link at the top of the page.
