Climate Change Minister Simon Watts has directed officials to undertake a stocktake of local government climate-related planning and investment.
In a recently-released letter, Watts, who is also Minister of Local Government, said he wants councils to make climate-related decisions that are "proportionate, evidence-based, and represent value for money."
"The Government is increasingly concerned that some climate-related planning and investment decisions may be relying on high-end emissions scenarios in a way that results in unnecessary costs being imposed on ratepayers, businesses, and communities," said Watts.
He said he has directed government officials to undertake a stocktake of current council practices. Additionally officials are to; "provide advice on whether extra national direction, reporting requirements or legislative changes are needed to “ensure climate-related decisions appropriately balance resilience, affordability, and value for money for ratepayers."
"The Government's expectation is clear: councils should plan for climate risks, but they must also plan for affordability."
Watts' letter was met with criticism from Opposition parties. In a statement to interest.co.nz on Monday, Labour’s climate spokesperson Deborah Russell said the letter; “demonstrates the short-term thinking National has toward climate change.” Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said; "every dollar we don't spend getting ahead of these [extreme weather] events becomes many more dollars we spend cleaning up after them."
Value for money
Watts noted that two of the worse potential global climate scenarios, the so-called SSPS-8.5 and RCP8.5 are now; "best regarded as less likely, high-impact emissions scenarios that are useful for stress testing and contingency planning."
"They should not automatically be treated as the central or most likely future when making decisions that affect infrastructure investment, land use, property rights, or rates," he said.
The SSPS-8.5 and RCP8.5 are global climate scenarios - with SSPS-8.5 being a worst-case scenario with very high emissions and RCP8.5 being a very high warming scenario, according to the Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport.
“New Zealand faces significant infrastructure challenges. Every dollar spent on resilience measures is a dollar that cannot be spent on fixing roads, upgrading water infrastructure, improving community facilities, or reducing pressure on rates."
“Councils must therefore ensure climate-related decisions are proportionate, evidence-based, and represent value for money," he wrote.
The letter outlined the Government's expectations of councils, including that they; “use a range of credible climate scenarios when assessing infrastructure and planning decisions, including medium and high-end scenarios,” and identified which scenario had been adopted as the primary planning assumption.
The Government also wanted councils to “demonstrate the additional costs associated with higher-end climate assumptions and disclose the impact on rates, debt, and long-term affordability” and prioritise “adaptive pathways and staged investment approaches … rather than defaulting to immediate construction of infrastructure designed solely around worst-case assumptions”.
Watts also wants councils to ensure regulatory decisions affecting landowners, businesses and communities are supported by; “robust evidence and are proportionate to the risks being managed." Additionally that major climate-driven capital expenditure proposals are subjected to “rigorous cost-benefit analysis and independent challenge.”
The Government did not think it was appropriate that worst-case scenario assumptions become “the default basis for investment decisions that impose significant costs on current and future ratepayers”, the letter said.
“Councils should be able to demonstrate that climate-related investments are necessary, proportionate, and represent the best use of scarce public resources.”
‘Councils are on the frontline of climate response’
Rehette Stoltz, president of Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), the local government lobby group, told interest.co.nz that local government always balances the need to invest with affordability. Stoltz said extreme weather events are hitting communities more frequently and becoming more damaging.
"Every dollar spent on disaster preparedness saves at least $4 in response and recovery. Doing nothing not only puts undue pressure on public finances in the long run but comes with significant risk to New Zealanders.”
Stoltz said LGNZ had long called for more clarity over who should pay when it comes to resilience issues.
LGNZ would welcome “clear and consistent direction on the climate scenarios that should be used for planning and decision making”, she said.
Stoltz said a standardised approach to risk assessment methodology is something local government has widely called for.
"Councils are on the frontline of climate response, including current and ongoing emergency responses to severe weather as we speak," Stoltz said.
“We think it would be a more efficient use of resource if the government were to undertake a single review and set clear nationally-consistent expectations for councils following that process."
‘We have to get out of this pattern of crisis and response’
Swarbrick said Watts was trying to have it both ways.
“With one hand he says he wants a climate adaptation framework, and with the other he's telling councils to pull back on exactly the planning and investment that framework is supposed to drive.”
She said "we know that 97% of spending is going into responding and rebuilding after extreme weather, and just 3% is going into building resilience."
"Every dollar we don't spend getting ahead of these events becomes many more dollars we spend cleaning up after them.
“We have to get out of this pattern of crisis and response. Telling councils to plan for less risk doesn't make the risk go away," Swarbrick said.
“The Government should be supporting and resourcing councils to plan properly for the climate reality and build resilience, rather than consistently undermining and chastising them for doing the work this Government evidently refuses to do."
Meanwhile Russell said climate change posed a significant threat and the country needed to prepare for even more damaging weather events than we are already experiencing.
“This requires planning and investment to ensure people, homes, critical infrastructure and livelihoods are kept safe. It makes good economic sense to build resilience so that the effects of climate change don’t cause enormous damage in the long term,” Russell said.
“This letter demonstrates the short-term thinking National has toward climate change."
“By telling councils that money spent on climate resilience means less for other things, they are willing to take shortcuts and kick the can down the road to future generations to deal with flooding, slips, droughts and erosion, and the uncertainty that brings for communities.”
32 Comments
Local authorities (represented by the diminishing LGNZ membership as its partisan agendas have been revealed) are grandstanding in their incessant attempts to expand their empire by scope creep.
They should stay out of climate change, particularly in areas they have neither expertise or experience: thats the role of central government & the emissions trading scheme.
https://environment.govt.nz/what-government-is-doing/areas-of-work/clim…
Bollocks. Thrice.
Anyone why has a child or grandchild, has the right - nay obligation - to be part of the change (from the regime this bunch of dinosaurs are touting, which can be summed up in one word: unsustainable). Surplus energy gave us elites, but they are as temporary as the surplus, and we need to be looking further ahead.
The Limits to Growth - this being a finite portion of a finite, already half-depleted planet - are upon us, and looking past the peddles of more growth, we will inevitably become more and more local. Probably to the point of not being nationally-governed at all. No wonder the push to eliminate touts for any decisions to be made locally.
OH - and the ETS is a failure in the making. Proof is that every year it has existed, we've gotten worse.
I guess we all have to sleep with our consciences...
As a citizen, resident, ratepayer and taxpayer, I expect the appropriate levels of government to pull the levers required to make substantive change to address the benefits and risks of the day on behalf of my household, community and nation.
Climate is one of those.
National schemes without local action are meaningless and ineffective.
I reckon it's great that Councils are getting on with addressing their GHG pollution.
NZ "schemes" are simply expensive, meaningless and ineffective virtue signaling: we are ~0.17% of global emissions & New Zealand is a net carbon sink
"Within Australasia, Australia was a net source of 38.2 ± 75.8 TgC yr−1, and New Zealand was a net CO2 sink of −38.6 ± 13.4 TgC yr−1."
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GB007845
A UK study showed 57 companies were responsible for 80% of global climate emissions – which had increased since the Paris agreement.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-05/small-cohort-of-mega-polluters-p…
Again: bollocks.
The measure is: per head. On that basis, NZ is no saint. Worse, the counts usually avoid offshoring; out whiteware emissions, for instance, are counted as China's, etc.
But it's not really about emissions, or Climate. It's really about peddling a lie. An untruth. On behalf of a reducing few who benefit. Albeit temporarily.
Edit - and don't blame the Companies - that's a Green cop-out. Blame us - we buy the stuff they proffer.
Per head? So theoretically, the maroon on a sub arctic island, burning, peat, driftwood and seal fat and oil, all day every day to cook and keep warm, could potentially be the globe’s greatest emission polluter? Vaguely remember discussing this hypothesis some time ago, but can’t remember the summation?
You are quite capable of thinking better than that.
Because it's a fatally-flawed posit, from first principles - and a simple piece of logic tells you so.
The problem is that humans evolved in an above-ground environment where the fossil carbon was all locked away underground. Naturally, we evolved to fit that balance, not to fit one with all the carbon dug up and released. Digging it up, releasing it and ADDING it to the above-ground arena, is the problem.
Whereas your scenario is zero-sum in above-ground carbon terms (using already-there carbon).
I spend a lot of time thinking about thinking, and the teaching thereof. Logic is only one form; Systems is another, lateral thinking is in there too. The Torrance approach - the antithesis of the Stanford 'all we want is unthinking bricks in the wall' one - is intriguing. But illogic is illogic is illogic.
Although elsewheres milk consumption counts as our cow fart emissions
If we add all countries that produce less than 1% of global emissions we'd have over 30% represented ‘But we’re just 1% of emissions’: do smaller countries’ climate efforts matter? | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian
Even if NZ's ecosystems were a net carbon sink (a marginal assumption),
1. the model neglects embodied emissions in imported goods
2. the model addresses flows but ignores stocks. The quantum and longevity of carbon emitted vs carbon stored is crucial
3. natural systems seek equilibrium until forced out by other forces. In this case we're burning through both our fossil fuels as well as our natural carbon-buffering capacity faster than that carbon can be sequestered, leading to harmful effects like ocean acidification
Chemistry, biology and physics are fundamental. They don't care about anyone's narrative and will carry on regardless of anyone's claim of "virtue signalling".
I'm less concerned about carbon in the atmosphere than its effect on the life supporting ecosystems that feed, clothe and shelter us. Most life forms cease being productive in conditions much past 30 degrees C, fish can't breathe in water that is too hot and all marine life relies on the oceans, lakes and rivers being within a narrow pH band.
Or in finance language - we're loading up on risk and contingent liability, hoping it never eventuates or that the effects manifest elsewhere before we have wholesale writeoffs. There's no LLC to containerise the effects of this one mate. Best be getting on with it
38 million tonnes of carbon sunk per annum is a not "marginal" when compared to all of our hydrocarbon fuel emissions at 20 million tonnes per annum. That also ignore the 7 million km2 carbon sink that is our continental shelf seashell deposition which again dwarfs our hydrocarbon imports.
As much as the climate change industry may want it not to be, we are a vast carbon sink. There is simply not enough capita here to move the dial. We should move on to actual problems rather than keep filling the carbon industry trough.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB007845
https://environment.govt.nz/assets/uploads/Figure-1-GHGsnapshot-MfE__Fi…
Marginal in terms of utility vs risky side effects. If we rely on loading up CO2 on oceanic ecosystems instead of humankind taking responsibility for dealing with its own pollution problems, then things like Diatoms (which produce 20% of the world's oxygen and rely on pH of oceans being within a narrow range) stop being viable and their ecosystems collapse. Diatoms feed anchovies. Anchovies feed massive marine fisheries
Even if climate change didn't exist, reducing carbon emissions is still important Profile. One can try ignore the chemistry, but the excess CO2 will always need to go somewhere
So if every big country split themselves up into lots of small countries the size of NZ, global warming would be solved?
See my post below, re thinking...
I personally am responsible for 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of global emissions. Therefore anything i do personally is irrelevant virtue signalling. Rinse and repeat for 8.3 billion people
Isn't this article more about planning and building anyway? Like if council build a new sea wall do they spec to the worst case sea height or somewhere below.
Exactly right Jimbo. The usual crew of powderdown etc. just can't help themselves but go down the rabbit hole of emissions & energy consumption - but it's not what the article is about.
I know a developer in Northland who has spent millions building up the ground levels of their subdivision due to the Whangarei & Far North councils using worst case scenario modelling for sea level rise - only then to have those same councils approve new buildings in their CBD's which sit 1.5m lower than the level that the subdivision is being made to build up to!!
And yes - the developer simply passes on these costs - so using worst-case hysteria modelling means it is significantly more expensive for the end purchaser, but then the same mob moan about housing affordability. Can't have your cake and eat it too folks.
Still, to purchase one of those would be sensible risk mitigation.
"The Government is increasingly concerned that some climate-related planning and investment decisions may be relying on high-end emissions scenarios in a way that results in unnecessary costs being imposed on ratepayers, businesses, and communities," said Watts.
Amounts to him saying if we pretend for long enough about problems that don't really exist they will go away... with the whispered aside to his colleagues - don't mention anything about global warming before the general election. So a double denial and not fit to govern.
I believe some of the worst case predictions have already been avoided by the current actions taken. Emissions are already much lower than the worst predictions.
I think Watts has a reasonable point.
I disagree with the first part of your last sentence.
And the last part.
Trends and fed-back loops are real physics.
Money is nothing. You and he both fixate on the nothing, as if it was important.
It ain't. As any engineer would know.
What you personally believe is irrelevant. Current actions taken although offering some hope that green house gas concentrations will stop rising at some point in the future, but they are not yet and are still increasing. Watts position is therefore not reasonable. Furthermore it is not rational. It's an avoidance of reality that puts the NZ population at risk.
I think you are greatly overstating how smart local councils are - they couldn't plan a piss up in a brewery, let alone pretend to be planning for climate scenarios.
Watts is taking a very reasonable position on this given the lefty / climate alarmism nonsense that has infiltrated every corner of councils up and down the country. All this has done is add huge cost to construction - which is all ultimately passed on to us folks.
When was the last time you saw a coastal property being swallowed by the sea due to sea level rise - I have never seen one!! And yet councils are modelling massive sea level rises in the next 100 years. Nonsense.
Googles AI response to your criticism.
AI Overview
New Zealand faces significant property threats, primarily from coastal erosion and river flooding driven by climate change. Nationwide, an estimated 219,000 homes (worth over NZ$180 billion) are currently located in at-risk flood zones.
RNZ +4
Specific details of these threats include:
- Short-Term Flood Damage: A report prepared for the government estimates 14,500 properties could suffer damaging floods. The equivalent of a severe regional flood (like the Tasman District floods) is expected nearly every year.
RNZ
- Long-Term Coastal Risk: Between 2026 and 2060, about 1,300 homes are set to experience greater than 20 percent damage from extreme events.
RNZ
- Zone Changes: Around 12,000 high-risk properties have been downzoned (rezoned for less intensive use) by councils to manage natural hazard exposure.
Facebook·Newstalk ZB +1
- Regional Impacts: In coastal Auckland, up to 17,600 homes are at risk from sea-level rise. In Christchurch, up to 6,000 properties are threatened by coastal erosion.
Stuff +1
You can read the full Estimated Number and Valuation Report via the Ministry for the Environment to understand how the data was modeled.
Ministry for the Environment
If you would like, tell me your specific region or suburb, and I can find the exact natural hazard data and risk mitigation plans for your area.
"In coastal Auckland, up to 17,600 homes are at risk from sea-level rise" - oh please.
Find me evidence of one home that has floated out to sea on the back of rising sea level in the last 100 years. But apparently there are 17,600 homes about to float away at high tide just in Auckland.
Storm surge coinciding with high tide has caused issues - but that has been the case forever.
All this does presuppose that local government has the physical ability, intellectual capacity and doctrinal flexibility to meet any of these objectives.
"The last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate," Larter told Live Science in an interview. "We don't know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it's definitely going to go."
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/antarctica/poised-to-disintegr…
I have an engineers report on a section subdivision where the house had to be built up about 750mm due to inundation based on a NIWA report using RCP6.5. Something likely to happen not before in 2080. Highly skeptical of NIWA's modelling of the inundation. This had a cost impact on the build. The floor level was mandatory. What to do in a case like this. A warning and an entry in the LIM about potential inundation in 50+ years time. Insurance. Likely uninsurable or extremly expensive with that entry in the LIM. Fix. Any inundation at the owners risk but forcing the insurance companies and NHC (aka previous EQC) to enable insurance for earthquakes, Volcano hurricanes etc but allowing inundation based on questionable modelling to be excluded.
Quite reasonable.
Most houses last much longer than 50 years; the build energy can never be reclaimed, nor can the site (ex demolition).
So quite reasonable -
You aren't alone in arguing from a personal-advantage/disadvantage POV, but big-picture, precaution is better than a red-zone in hindsight.
But the increasingly desperate need to try and re-boot GROWTH - impossible from here on - is a powerful driver of some (like the Minister.
It's got nothing to do with build energy (whatever that nonsense means) or growth.
It comes down to whether using the worst-case scenario (which has a high-degree of uncertainty, given there is also a best-case scenario...) to make decisions makes sense. Using worst-case scenario in every department in council adds a huge amount of cost.
It is this "worst-case" nonsense mindset that has led to an explosion in road cones, traffic management plans, health and safety officers etc. because council always think that without these interventions the "worst-case" scenario will play out. Hint - it won't, as we aren't all as dumb as Council thinks.
Rather that calling something nonsense while acknowledging your ignorance of it (thus invalidating your name-call, but maybe you don't understand that either?) try learning about it. Then have an opinion with some weight behind it.
We are at the cusp of the global Limits to Growth - therefore facing energy and material curtailment(s). That essentially means that what we build now, has to last. In a long enough timeframe, the house (mother nature) always wins. Shorter than that, becomes an 'odds' thing.
But if we keep burning the remaining FF stock, you can call or reject anything you like - but we know the displacement of the (melted) polar ice...
Is sense someone with a vested interest?
To have the words "Councils" and "Climate Change" in the same same sentence is truly scary. Kiwis are lambs to the slaughter where virtue signalling trumps all else.
I kind of agree. Because climate is but one of the problems facing humanity - it is rightly being called a polycrisis.
And there are no 'fixes'; merely best cards to play in the circumstances.
Most folk who 'get' the physics of Climate forcing, still cling to the possibility that they can abandon carbon-bond energy, and still live a first-world rate of consumption. Unfortunately impossible.
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