New Zealanders are facing shifting and intensifying climate-related pressures and climate change is not business-as-usual hazard management, a report from the Climate Change Commission says.
On Thursday, the commission released its 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment report. This looks at current and future risks the country faces, which in turn allows the Government to make decisions and take action through the national adaptation plan.
Its chief executive, Jo Hendy, said as the climate continues to warm, climate hazards are expected to become more severe and widespread.
“This will narrow the adaptation options available to communities and sectors and increase the level of risk that cannot be avoided.”
The report highlighted the country's most significant climate-based risks, and these are:
- Key infrastructure: Water infrastructure, buildings, road and rail networks
- Communities and safety: Social and community wellbeing, emergency management, ngā mea hirahira o te ao Māori - risks in the Māori world
- Nature and the bioeconomy: Ecosystems and biodiversity, and forestry
- Decisions and funding: Central and local government funding, decision-making and delivery
“They are risk areas that are already seriously affecting people, or will soon and take time to prepare for, and they are the ones where acting soon can have the biggest influence on many other risks," the Commission said.
“Many of the most significant risks relate to systems that support people’s quality of life and economic resilience: like roads and railways, drinking water, and natural resources. Effective adaptation to reduce those risks will depend on strengthening the country’s underpinning structures and tools - such as funding and financing systems, trust in democratic institutions, social connections and wellbeing.”
Hendy said focusing on where risk is highest and impact greatest, while getting the basics right, can create a co-ordinated plan strengthening NZ’s resilience.
'If we don't act, costs could run into the billions and affect every part of people's lives'
The Commission says addressing climate change challenges can deliver benefits strengthening the economy, society and NZ's environmental foundation.
Investing attention and resources into; "carefully prioritised adaptation action would substantially reduce future costs and losses associated with climate change,” the report said.
“Acting to strengthen the country’s underpinning structures and tools – such as funding and financing systems, trust in democratic institutions, social connections and wellbeing – will be important to support the adaptation needed for climate change.”
Hendy said focusing effort and investment on a few key things would have much wider benefits and help bring the overall cost down. An example she used was buildings and flooding. According to the report, approximately 556,000 buildings are currently exposed to inland flooding, with a combined replacement value of $235 billion.
“If we build homes that can cope with floods and extreme weather, we’re not just protecting the building, we’re protecting people’s health, keeping essential services running, and helping keep those homes insurable,” Hendy said.
“If we don’t act, costs could run into the billions and affect every part of people’s lives.”
“By getting it right at the national level, and turning our focus to building climate resilience, we can break the cycle of react and recover,” Hendy said.
“We currently have an imbalance where 97% of government spend is on responding to natural hazards and only 3% on building resilience.”
A lot of effort often goes into recovery and while this mattered, it couldn’t come at the expense of making things more resilient, Hendy said.
The Climate Commission delivers these reports every six years and the Minister of Climate Change, Simon Watts, is required to respond within two years of the report’s publication with a new national adaptation plan.
'Adaptation a key priority for the Government'
Asked about the report, Watts said: "We recognise the significant risks climate change poses, and we are already seeing those impacts across New Zealand."
He referred to the National Adaptation Framework and said the Government was progressing "a range of work across the planning system, emergency management, and local government to give us an enduring system that prepares New Zealand for the impacts of climate change, while keeping costs to our society as low as possible".
"Adaptation is a key priority for the Government."
The Government would now be considering the commission's findings, he said, as it develops the next national adaptation plan over the next two years.
26 Comments
Watts wouldn't know it it was daylight or dark.
And adaption isn't a key priority for this Government - bewilderedly, doggedly adhering to the past, is their only priority.
Doomed to fail.
As are those who think we can EV and party-on.
Can you explain why you think the EROI of renewables is inevitably negative.
Not negative - can't ever remember saying that.
But not positive enough to maintain BAU - physical churn - by some orders of magnitude.
This is a free download book, older but impeccable: David MacKay FRS: : Contents and from an impeccable source.
So far, no 'renewable' (they're really rebuildables; dams, windmills, PV panels) has built a 'renewable; not dam built a dam, no windmill ever built a windmill. Not even close. They do it by piggybacking on fossil energy, which has been geologically compressed over eons into low-entropy energy.
20+ years ago, I thought it could and was an early and enthusiastic adopter. Then I realised what the linked book says - and tried the efficient/frugal pathway; indeed, I don't know of (m)any who have pushed that further. And I can tell you I'm still not off fossil support. Not by a long chalk - although I/we could survive for a year or two coasting on our accumulation - and reorganise in the breather-space.
Just ask yourself what replaces bitumen, post fossil feedstocks arriving? Laid by what? What food gets fertilised? Exported? You think we can do that with electricity?
I'll acknowledge that food is energy, that therefore you can perhaps electrify a lab and assemble 'food' energy out of the electrical energy. I'll buy that idea. But where do you get the electrical energy to make the food energy? And we're back to what makes the dams, reactors, grids...
Professor Tom Murphy was an astrophysicist - now emeritus. Nobody's fool. His pathway paralleled mine; off grid self-built, good problem-solving brain, logical (as physics requires of one) but he eventually realised it was all temporary. His blogsite is worth every second you spend there. His (also free) textbook is: The Science Book of the Decade: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, by Tom Murphy - MAHB
Come back when you've read both, Keith, and let's have a think about food-production in light of them.
I will come back to you but it may take a while as I battle onwards with chemotherapy.
KeithW
Holy shit Keith! Best wishes for successful treatment and we shouldn't be surprised if you stay away from us gloomsters as a positive mindset will aid recovery far more than a negative mindset.
I have been on cycles of chemo for 3.5 years - not bad given my initial prognosis was only a few weeks. I plan to hang around for a while yet.
Here's the visual version:
Power, Overshoot, and Climate with Tad Patzek | TGS 219 - YouTube
How long before the geo engineers are set loose?
A conversation well worth listening to even if bleak
pdk,
I have now ordered the book by Tom Murphy. Expensive, but I look forward to reading it. As you know, i don't always agree with you, but in the absence of a world full of micro sized fission reactors, I think we will eventually have to, in very simple terms, do less with less. Much of what we consider to be 'essential' to modern life will prove to be dispensable. I believe that the fossil fuel age will last much longer than you think and of course, I know that I may be proved quite wrong. As the Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar-inventor of the Dewar Flask-said; "Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open".
PDKs argument is the constant energy impacting Earth from the Sun multiplied by the life expectancy of the renewable infrastructure (ER) will inevitably be less than the energy accumulated in fossil fuels built up over millions of years (EI).
No, that isn't the all of it - although you precis it better than most.
We are a species, like any other. We rely on the inter-web of life - plants, photosynthesis, microbes, the carbon cycle, the whole nine yards. Some of those are tuned to higher entropy lifestyles - those facilitating decay, for instance, but we require the sunlight to be spread and available to what we can call biodiversity. Which we've been wiping out increasingly - the 6th great extinction is because of us.
Then there is the need to reflect/exhude the same amount of energy coming in, back out. Because failure to do so either heats up or cools down the planet - with runaway feedback potential capable of taking things outside our survivable limits. We know we have become big enough to be planet-forcing, done by merely digging up the buried carbon. So that is a life-essential limitation.
Don't transgress those two, and I'm relaxed about what we do inside those limits.
But I here to say that those who have studied such things, generally agree that we will end up on real-time solar, having burned our way through all prior stocks. And that the best nature, or us, have managed, is about 25% capture, per area (read the book, first link). That's a lot of area, and we're doing something with the best, closest area, already already. Then there's materials; both the mining and the dissipation-parrying thereof, for all this magical build-out. Both linked books crunch the math.
And that on real-time solar, we will be down to 2 billion - at good peasant level - or 600million at ours (an oxymoron; at 600mill, you cannot specialise enough.
"(an oxymoron; at 600mill, you cannot specialise enough. "
Have yet to read the links but at 600 million what do you (or the author(s) suggest we cannot specialise in?....governance, engineering, medical ....?
Granted we will have fewer available but even prior to the industrial rev. we managed to support an elite class and scholars.
Maybe - depends on how cohesive and how spread out; how climate has played out, how much was saved and how much triaged away/
The Report is riddled with the implausible RCP8.5 pathway which has been excluded from CMIP7 and was redundant ten years ago. The domestic chicken little industry needs to get busy writing new bed wetting reports without RCP8.5, or come up with a new scare to keep them at the trough.
"For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible"
The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7)
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/2627/2026/
And from 2017...
"Accounting for this bias indicates RCP8.5 and other ‘business-as-usual scenarios’ consistent with high CO2 forcing from vast future coal combustion are exceptionally unlikely. Therefore, SSP5-RCP8.5 should not be a priority for future scientific research or a benchmark for policy studies."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544217314597
What does your crystal ball say about coal use, after oil and gas are depleted and the yeast cult still demands exponential growth?
He's just a bacteria.
What would he know?
The recoverable coal required to meet RCP8.5 hasn't been found, nor are you going to find 13 billion people to use 6x more per capita. So to meet your bed wetting scenario you are going to have to discover a lot of undiscovered coal, get breeding, and convince the babies to use a 6x for a product whose demand has flatlined in the past decade. Or you could just follow the IPCC's lead and drop the scenario? It will save you a lot of bed sheets either way.
"In this paper, we explain why vast expansion in 21st-century coal consumption should not be used to describe any plausible reference case of the global energy future. Illustrating coal as a practically unlimited backstop supply is inconsistent with the current state of coal markets, technology, and reserve estimates. Future coal production faces many uncertainties, but the key uncertainty for long-term scenarios is the recoverable portion of reserves, not how many total geologic resources will eventually become reserves."
The 1000 GtC coal question: Are cases of vastly expanded future coal combustion still plausible?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140988317301226
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-coal-consumption-…
Well you see RCP8.5 isn't a coal burning pathway, it's a pathway to increased heat trapped in the Earth climate system, represented by an increase in IR forcing of 8.5w/m2 averaged over the surface of the planet. How we get there isn't dependent solely on the amount of coal burned. RCP8.5 would be reached by a combination of wreckless burning and feedbacks. RCP8.5 is openly acknowledged to be at the top end of the IPCC modeling range and one of low probability of occurrence in the near term. In saying that, obviously the RCP2.6 pathway was always the least probable, as burners have already trashed that pathway.
Coal consumption has flatlined due to gas being readily availible. Should gas resources dwindle, climate deniers such as yourself and the orange US bandit, will be cheering beautiful clean coal again. Got to keep the yeast project on target..........for extinction.
"We remain unable to rule out that the sensitivity could be above 4.5°C per doubling of carbon dioxide levels, although this is not likely."
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019RG000678
We're getting close to one doubling already! So lets hope sensitivity isn't higher!
"Adding all greenhouse gases together, concentrations reached 524 ppm of CO2-equivalent."
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/S…
The sky isn't going to fall on your head. Perhaps find a new hobby?
"For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible"
The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7)
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/2627/2026/
"Accounting for this bias indicates RCP8.5 and other ‘business-as-usual scenarios’ consistent with high CO2 forcing from vast future coal combustion are exceptionally unlikely. Therefore, SSP5-RCP8.5 should not be a priority for future scientific research or a benchmark for policy studies."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544217314597
Who said the sky was falling? Apart from chicken little and science deniers? You think the good people at Copernicus are on your anti science side of the climate catastrophe? Delusional thinking!
+1.5 degrees heating is already a disaster. It appears to be enough to melt all the permanant ice off the Southern alps for a start! The sort of heating RCP8.5 would initiate means human extinction. Your precious capitalist economy in a pile of ash! As I've already said 8.5 was always a high end scenario. Implausable, but not impossible!
The new proposed scenario models:
-
High emission scenario: A scenario with emissions as high as judged to be plausible, based on assuming developments that include a rollback of current mitigation policies. This scenario is expected to result in forcings below SSP5-8.5.
-
High-to-Low emission scenario: A scenario that follows approximately the same emissions pathway as the High, but changes course in the second half of the century, applying strong mitigation measures to reach net zero CO2 emissions by 2100.
-
Medium emission scenario: A middle scenario exploring consequences of extending current policies and trends into the future.
-
Medium-to-Low emission scenario: A scenario exploring a delayed increase in mitigation efforts, short of the Paris temperature goal but achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by the end of the century, with a period of net negative CO2 emissions thereafter to achieve 1.5 °C on a multi-century timescale.
-
Low emission scenario: The Low emission scenario is designed to be consistent with the pursuit of holding warming to a level likely below 2 °C, without returning to 1.5 °C before the end of the century. The scenario is extended beyond 2100 by an emissions trajectory leading to a slow decrease of warming afterwards.
-
Very Low emission scenario: The Very Low emission scenario is designed to keep the temperature level as low as plausible given feasibility constraints. This scenario is thus relevant for the low end of the Paris range (staying as close as plausible to 1.5 °C at the time of peak warming and limiting warming to 1.5 °C by the end of the century).
-
Low-to-Negative emission scenario: The last trajectory is a scenario with a higher overshoot of the 1.5 °C goal, followed by stringent climate policies resulting in net-negative greenhouse gas emissions to return to lower warming levels, thus supporting research into the reversibility of climate outcomes and their impacts.
Taking note of the current direction of increasing geopolitical instability, which of these scenarios seem more likely?
"Implausable, but not impossible!"
So you agree it is implausible. Great to see you on board with peer review. Well done you!
RCP 8.5 was considered in the 90th percentile range. It's what the science says and I'm happy to accept what the science says. The consequences of that 10% chance are a catestrophic (as are the other scenarios, just less so) extinction event for humans. Would you drive a car on a steep windy down hill, with a ten percent chance of brake failure?
on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible"
The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7 (ScenarioMIP-CMIP7)
profile,
Yes, those high emission levels have finally been discarded as should have happened a long time ago. What hasn't changed is the reality of the human influence on the climate. here is just one of many papers on one aspect of it. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260504023852.htm
What interests me is what this might mean looking ahead though I will be long gone before we find out. I now subscribe to the view of Mike Hulme, Professor of Human geography at Cambridge University and someone who has been involved in climate science for over 40 years. He expounds his views in Climate Change Isn't Everything which looks closely at what he calls Climatism, or climate alarmism, but regularly reminds the reader that; "my arguments in this chapter should not be interpreted in any way as mounting a challenge to the solidity of the scientific evidence that human influences on the physical climate are now substantial and are still growing".
It's a pity the science direct study is behind a paywall. I'd love to see the references they used to reach their conclusions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544217314597
"The conceptual basis of this LBE theory anticipates that ongoing fossil energy extraction induces a learning effect which increases the availability of lower-grade resources. A compounding learning effect applied over decades depicts the totality of geologic oil, gas, and coal deposits as a viable fuel source for economic production. Section 3 argues this formulation of technical change for 'time-less' energy resource stocks leads long-term energy scenarios to rely on coal when the horizon of information for other energy resources expires - a problem of using the LBE theory as the plausible basis for future energy system scenarios that return to coal"
Be interesting to know what the basis for their conclusion that a return to coal is implausible? My guess is it would depend how hard the cult of exponential growthism is allowed to push the accelerater before environmental and social pushback?
Just email the author and ask for a copy if you can't dig out the full paper.
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