Taking Resilience More Seriously

This year New Zealand has been given the clearest signal yet that we need to do our part to address climate change, both in reducing our emissions – which by most measures we’re not even trying to do – and in improving our resilience.

An interesting article yesterday by Radio NZ highlights that our national transport agency Waka Kotahi has not been taking either climate change or resilience seriously, and only recently has it been getting to grips with the latter.

Until recently Waka Kotahi was not factoring climate change and the need for resilience into many of its transport projects, and is said to be swamped by the need to respond to crises.

In its National Resilience Programme Business Case, produced by Tonkin + Taylor and Tregaskis Brown in 2020, the agency was criticised for “disjointed and reactive decision-making” which had led to “suboptimal and inefficient investment choices and is hampering our ability to adapt”.

The Business Case was commissioned by Waka Kotahi in 2019 because it wanted to better understand the impact of natural hazards, climate change and severe weather on the national roading network. Waka Kotahi says it is now using the findings and recommendations of the business case to prioritise resilience and climate change.

Alongside the 308-page report, an interactive map was produced showing the location of more than 350 current risks to the national transport network, 38 of which were deemed to be extreme.

The report, and the map, also looked ahead to 2050, identifying 90 extreme risks due to the increased severity of storms and rising sea levels.

It paints a palpable picture. Some of the extreme risks to the national roading network are not thought to be fixable, with any new engineering work pointless in the face of climate change.

The roads are ticking time bombs, with landslides, rock fall, coastal inundation and sea level rise, flooding, and earthquakes essentially guaranteed to take them out of action, leading to long-term outages.

The report found long-standing issues with how transport projects were funded. Resilience is usually not a priority.

“Design requirements do not adequately take into consideration long-term sea-level rise or other climate-change related scenarios,” the report said.

“While the likelihood of hazards occurring are known (eg. risk of landslide) they are often deprioritised in favour of more immediate issues.

“It is difficult for a local authority to prioritise an investment to protect against an event that might happen at some stage in the future in the face of community pressure to fund something else, or to keep rates down.

“The consequence of this is that when an event does occur, preventative or mitigating measures are not in place, and yet more pressure is put on emergency funding.”

[……]

As a result of the failure to account for increasing hazards, the cost of emergency work is skyrocketing.

In 2014/15, emergency works spending by Waka Kotahi was $30 million, but by 2018/19 those costs were $72m.

In other words, we’ve waited for the cliff to be at the bottom of the cliff before acting.

To put those emergency works costs into perspective, the government a few days ago announced another $275 million – on top of $250 million earlier in the year – to help fund repairs to roads in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle and the floods in January. They’ve also put $200 million into fixing parts of the rail network damaged during those events.

The article also gives a recent example of where improving resilience wasn’t included in the planning.

A case study provided for the report was that of State Highway 60 at Takaka Hill, in Tasman.

In February 2018, during Cyclone Gita, Takaka Hill Road was damaged when a box culvert at the base of the hill was overwhelmed by storm debris, with water overtopping the road.

The culvert was known to not comply with Transport Agency standards, and the resulting flooding damaged a neighbouring property.

As part of the repair process it was proposed that the culvert be brought up to standard by increasing its capacity and alignment, and involved realigning a stream and installing debris control structures.

The proposal was rejected because emergency funding only covered immediate road reinstatement, despite costs of about $20m to repair the route.

“The result of this is that a known weakness in the SH network is allowed to persist, even though repair and improvement works were being planned and undertaken at the same time to several other parts of the route in close proximity.

“With the increasing frequency of high-intensity storms expected as a result of climate change, and as a result of catchment damage from ex-tropical storm Cyclone Gita, it is likely that damage and resultant closures will be experienced in this location again in the foreseeable future.”

Perhaps the government should look at diverting the funding for some of its hugely expensive but incredibly low benefit projects, into funding resilience projects. A prime candidate for this would be the emission-inducing Otaki to North of Levin project, which had a benefit to cost ratio of just 0.2 even before it doubled in cost to $1.5 billion.

One thing I am concerned about is that the government and Waka Kotahi treat resilience as big engineering just to maintain what we already have. Whereas in many cases, resilience can also be provided by (finally) catering for other modes.

As we saw last week, those who had the least travel-time impact from the rains and flooding were those on their bikes and those who jumped on e-scooters.

Of course, bikes won’t be the solution in every single case. But bikes do conspicuously come into their own in emergency circumstances, as this great post by Bike Auckland lays out: including in rural contexts, and for emergency services. (And who can forget the guy who e-biked to retrieve his daughter’s teddy bear from their flooded house?)

Given climate change means we will see more extreme weather events, exploring how bikes (and by extension e-scooters and other micromobility) fit into our response to disasters would be transformational for our community’s resilience and recovery.

Bikes are especially resilient in urban settings, and would be accessible to many more people and for many more daily uses – if only our transport agencies could get it together to build safe, welcoming networks so that more people can safely use them.

This is important for climate action, because cities and towns are also (surprise!) where the bulk of our transport emissions comes from, much of it from people using cars for short everyday trips. Those journeys are easiest to switch to bikes or micromobility, and so they should be top of mind for Waka Kotahi and local transport agencies in their planning and delivery.

As it happens, Waka Kotahi recently released its first Cycling Action Plan to lay out the path for better, faster delivery of exactly what’s needed to accommodate those basic daily trips. (Feedback on the Cycling Action Plan is welcome until 26 May.)

Around two thirds of the trips we make in New Zealand are less than 5km, which represents approximately 20 minutes by bike and 10 minutes by e-bike. Replacing short to medium distance car trips with cycling and micromobility is one of the most effective ways to cut transport emissions quickly, while achieving a range of co-benefits (Figure 2). It is also a relatively inexpensive way of achieving many transport outcomes. A New Zealand study has estimated money spent on high-quality cycling infrastructure yields benefits between ten and 25 times the costs.

Investment in alternatives such as cycling networks is how our transport agencies (and the people who guide them) will show us they hear the dual wake-up call loud and clear – to urgently improve resilience while also reducing emissions to help lower the chances and severity of future storms.

The two go hand-in-hand, and should be at the top of the agenda of every transport-related project, every council discussion, every consultation, every meeting-that-should-have-been-an-email, from here on out.

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