This is a guest post by Waitematā local board member Dr Alex Bonham, about the Auckland Council’s Shoreline Adaption Plans. Currently consultation is open for the Auckland Central & Ōrākei to Karaka Bay SAPs until December 18th.
If the sea bowls through your front door, through the house and onto your back lawn, leaving your home and belongings unsalvageable, you would retreat. No-brainer. You would start again out of harms way. If you were lucky you would still have insurance to mitigate your losses, if not, you’d be in trouble.
What if you had moved your house a few years prior to higher ground, and away from the cliff edge. You might even still have sea views but you have to walk a bit further to the beach. When the storms come, you’d shut the windows, hunker down and wait it out. What’s more you have not put yourself or your family at risk, or lost your most valuable and valued assets along the way.
When sea scouts played NIWA’s shoreline adaptation game recently they were unsentimental. Sell the vulnerable beachhouse, buy townhouses inland and rent one out as a passive income. The game morphed into a version of Monopoly as they tried to make as much money out of the economic opportunities of managed retreat as they could.
In real life however the decisions are not that simple. There is a lot of money and emotional and cultural connections invested in property at risk. Conversations about managed retreat have been going on for years but without central government direction, progress has been intermittent. Auckland Council’s efforts to engage with the community about these issues to develop a plan should be lauded.
Shoreline Adaptation Plans Out For Consultation
Auckland Council is currently consulting on the last tranche of shoreline adaptation plans for the region. These plans set how public assets on the coastline are managed. Public assets include parks and reserves, roads, the ports, ferry terminals, marinas and boardwalks.
They have divided the coastline into tranches and have applied one of four options to each. These are hold the line (sea walls etc), limited intervention, adaptation, and do nothing.
The private properties sitting on the coastline are a separate matter but if council decide not to maintain the road that reaches your property, or strengthen the cliff reserve that sits between you and the ocean that will likely have a significant impact on you. Council has no obligation to be a buffer for private property. Even if they decide now to hold the line, they are allowed to change their mind, but it is still helpful to understand their intentions.
Council have worked around the coast finishing with the city centre. Some areas have adopted their shoreline adaptation plans and others are under review. Check on the website, consultation is open on the Auckland Central & Ōrākei to Karaka Bay shoreline plans until 18th December. Council need to hear from you so share your views.
“Noone Cares About Emergencies Until they are the Only Thing You Care About”
This mantra from emergency management teams is pertinent and perhaps why council staff report that the conversations out West, where communities have felt what it is like to be cut off, and some retreat is proposed, are more heated than in Auckland’s city centre, which has in recent years been less impacted by infrastructure failure from storms and erosion, and where the proposal is to hold the line. The strengthened sea wall was of great help during last year’s floods.
While some communities in Waitakere may feel they will be abandoned by council, this is countered by others living in less isolated areas who report privately that the cost of maintaining public assets to service a small number of people is disproportionate and sucks money away from communities with greater numbers of people and greater needs.
With regard the city centre, the argument for hold the line is that this area is so important economically and so much has already been invested in it that we have to hold on. And hold on .
. .. . And hold on, even as the climate gets crazier, the sea gets higher and our resources get more and more stretched. If we chose to hold the line with the port and the Strand (that has been flooding for decades already) what opportunity cost does that have on everywhere else?
What the arguments of engineers in the city centre and those out West have in common is that they are based on sunk costs, vested interest, attachment to place and, I would posit, though it is rarely said explicitly, sheer terror of displacement, disempowerment and poverty itself. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved, we care more about loss than gain.
We want to hold on to what we have, and that makes it very hard to think clearly about how realistic holding onto the status quo is and when it might be appropriate to let go and adapt. We need time and information to get our heads round what big changes might mean – that’s not to say we can’t embrace those changes when we are ready.
Those kids playing the shoreline adaptation game would probably fund blue-green corridors, and let most vulnerable areas go. They might add in the comments section recommendations to put new investment in Auckland out of harms’ way and to build lots of apartments on the ridges close to safe transport links. The minority of kids who preferred to raise their houses, might reimagine downtown as a neighbourhood of canals.
The question is what is likely to be most effective, in cost and stress and opportunities for economic, environmental, cultural and social wellbeing over the long term.
The Value of a Flexible Adaption Approach
The Coastal management Framework takes an agile adaptive approach to planning with triggers and options. Triggers are better than timelines to direct adaptation approaches. If sea level gets to a certain point, this would shift strategic plans towards adaptation in certain areas. Options evolve as new information comes along, and if things don’t happen as anticipated one might keep rolling on without investing unnecessarily.
Taking up the port example, the wharves might stay as they are for years, or raised, extended inland and connected up to the road network further South. Or the whole port might shift.
The framework takes a 100-year approach. As New Zealand rarely seems to plan beyond thirty years this is welcome. To consider the broad range of options longterm and to consider how to shift investment priorities away from the coast is not to advocate to remove everything that is currently there. Rather its greatest value may be in guiding new development.
The framework also emphasizes that the community needs to have their say on the plan. To get across the information, to feedback on its impacts, that will inform how the plan is shaped and mean as a city we make the best decisions moving forward.
Being clear-sighted and taking a long view will give us a better chance of ensuring that our efforts now are not wasted but lead to a better chance for ourselves, our children and grandchildren.
Find out more and have your say at Have Your Say website.
This post, like all our work, is made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans. If you’d like to support our work, you can join our circle of supporters here, or support us on Substack!
Processing...
NZers are frequent fliers and long haul flights are very polluting, We will reap what we sow and much of NZ will be under water.
A University of Queensland-led study shows greenhouse gas emissions from tourism have been growing more than 2 times faster than those from the rest of the global economy.
Associate Professor Ya-Yen Sun from UQ’s Business School said rapid expansion in travel demand has meant carbon from tourism activities accounts for 9% of the world’s total emissions.
“Without urgent interventions in the global tourism industry, we anticipate annual increases in emissions of 3 to 4% meaning they will double every 20 years,” Dr Sun said.
Those numbers are debate- able,
Form the QLD research:
Only 1/3 of “tourism” activities are direct contributions – Aviation/Vehicle use etc, The other 2/.3 are indirect… they say it is utilities /fuel refining etc,
Its highly arguable that a portion ( how big is unclear) of those 2/3 would exist anyway and are just displaced from household emissions that would have occurred if people had remained at home and not gone on holiday ….
Aviation emissions are a very small part of the emissions picture, in 2023 aviation emissions were .8 -1 Gtonne…. China and India Coal use was 10 Gigatonne..
Giving up long haul travel might make you feel better but, its not going to save the planet until coal use is removed….
Very Wrong.
Your argument is a classic case of a false equivalence.
There is virtually zero interdependence of coal consumption and aviation fuel consumption.
A reduction in both are required.
In fact a reduction in all green house gasses is required but obviously percentage reductions in the largest sources of such gasses will produce the biggest reductions in absolute terms.
Aviation accounts for only 2% of global energy related C02 emissions. Before questioning if NZ should cut itself off from the rest of the world, perhaps you should eat your pet. A return flight from Auckland to London emits around 7.3MT of CO2 per pax. A large Dog has a carbon cost of 2.5MT of CO2 per year. Eat the dog and go to London every three years is my advice for saving the planet.
If I fly to Europe and use trains for the whole time there I wonder if it is better or worse than driving to Northland hauling a motorboat, driving all around the place and using the power boat every day or two to haul a skier or kid on an inflatable around.
Worse, by a wide margin. Europe is far — 40,000km round trip — and IIRC an airplane fuel burn per km per seat is the same order of magnitude as the fuel burn of a car per km.
It depends on how much you drive every year, actually. A modern jet in economy class has a much lower fuel consumption per kilometer per passenger than your typical car (2 to 2.5l/100km vs 4 to 8l/km). The average US person does at least 20000km of driving per year, mostly alone in his/her car (while long-haul flight are in average 90% full). I expect the average NZ driver does the same. So flying far but not driving much is certainly not much worse than not flying but driving regularly.
Other factors I did not include in this calculation, which are fairly difficult to quantify:
– Airplane contrails (+0% to 200% CO2 emissions on your flight) per most statistics.
– Road construction (vary greatly but can also double or triple the CO2 emission of your car trip).
– Car construction which emit on each new vehicle between 5t to 20t (for an electric SUV), which mechanically increase by 10% to 50% the normalized CO2 cost of your car trip.
Per comparison, airport and aircraft construction related CO2 only account for in average 5% of the total CO2 emission of a flight.
So to conclude, take as much as you can public transports and trains, and fly or drive responsibly.
I am sure we can raise up the reclaimed land around the wharf and the roads and railways built across the bays however Auckland Airport could be a problem although I suppose it could be an island.
Isn’t that missing the point? The Dutch have shown that yes, you can “wall out” the sea, and even have swathes of land below sea level. But they did that over many hundreds of years, at enormous cost in today’s money, for (comparatively) small changes. We will see sea level rises of several meters within the lifetime of some of the people reading this blog.
Sure, engineers can do pretty much everything. We could put a seawall across the whole Waitemata Harbour entrance (and then one across the golf course on the Shore, to prevent the sea doing an end run around it).
But the point is: We’re not a rich country, and in historic timespans, climate change will be a constant disaster of a thousand locations and issues. Short of some tech bro Sci-Fi solutions, we simply won’t have the money and time to do even all our rich suburbs, let alone all of our suburbs. We will lose quite a few. A decade ago I decided that that’s what will happen, and when I moved house, ignored anything lower than 10m above current sea level.
That’s what dithering on climate change for decades gives us: No real way out except retreat and adapt.
The Dutch land reclamations in the 20th C. alone increased the country’s landmass by 1,650 square kilometres. At least 17% of the total land is estimated to have been reclaimed. This is a relatively large amount of land not the ‘comparatively’ small amount that you blithely claim (I can’t help but wonder who you’re comparing the Netherlands to …)
This process of reclamation has been ongoing since the 13th century – and weathering all sorts of storms since – surely indicating that it’s a sustainable and robust means of keeping the sea out (without your imagined sci-fi solutions).
A lot of hostility in that response? I realised when I wrote the above that instead of “small changes” I should have said something like “limited sea rise” or similar – I was referring to the vertical difference. They were not dealing with climate change being predicted to raise the sea level by meters and meters. But I thought, hey, there’s no edit button and people will get what I mean. I guess I was wrong.
I look forward to your proposals for non-SciFi seawalls for Auckland (and indeed, other low-lying NZ cities) and how we can afford them. We already are spending all our money on tax cuts and new motorways, but I’m sure looking to the Dutch dikes is a “sustainable” solution to climate change. I’m sure. It will all be fine.
Well, let’s call it usually weathering all sorts of storms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953
Have I missed some insane modelling or is there credible evidence that we are looking at many metres of sea rises over the next 60 years or so?
Which modelling scenario gives way to this kind of rise? If that happened then you’re firmly in KYAG territory, there’s not a lot of adaptation that can be had over such a short timeframe.
The Netherlands are assessing scenarios of 2-5ms of sea level rise.
https://nltimes.nl/2024/03/04/netherlands-3-options-cope-sea-level-rise-dams-dikes-moving-water
NIWA is indicating some 0.4 within 30years, so I’d think that within this century we could easily see 1m rise. This assumes the modelling isn’t too “conservative” because it underestimated avalanche effects.
To be clear I didn’t say that my 10m was anything like the sea rise projected. It was just my rule of thumb where I wasn’t going to even look at buying, especially when you add storm surges etc.
My point remains: Even the “best” scenarios see large parts of coastal cities world-wide and in NZ under threat. That’s on top of even more extensive sections of coastal non-urban land (including many sections of key roads). We simply won’t have the money to raise or protect all these areas. I suspect we won’t even manage to protect most. We will be retreating – whether managed or otherwise is the question.
When thinking about the city centre, don’t forget everything below surface level. Wastewater needs to be protected from inflows, surface water needs somewhere to go when storm surges come on a high tide, basements need a plan when the streets are inundated. There is an underground railway. And the most expensive buildings continue to go up on what was once the harbour. The existing reclamation did not account for what we now understand. How much should be committed to protecting the Atlantean part of the city centre?
Ngati Whatua face another unpleasant prospect, like many other iwi, where early settlement areas and their urupa are at risk. Treaty settlements that have given them at-risk land become questionable.
What communities are willing now and in the future to pay for Council to manage community assets needs to be determined quickly. But we ask the people who have invested in the existing assets rather than the people – under voting age or unborn – who will have to live with the decisions.
Asking the Sea Scouts is sensible start.
Length of Dutch coastline 451km
Length of NZ coastline 15,000km
Overtime, it is not only the sea to worry about, but the impounded stormwater/groundwater that will well up inland as it has nowhere to go. Inundation front and rear! Elevation is required not necessarily distance from the coast. Some areas we will just have to give over to the sea, pick our battles and protect that which critically matters, if feasible. Tough decisions for all moving forward.
The Auckland port is dredging close to the warf and dumping the spoils out at sea. Any digging close to a coast will speed up erosion of the nearby shore.
The port should dump the dredgings on the Brigham St area where the land is being built up. Or in other places.
The article doesn’t discuss societal costs and moral hazard. If we bail out the owners in the 2023 floods/slips, has it set a precedent for those who are inundated in the future?
I feel that anyone who purchases in a high-risk area since (for example) 2019 when inundation and climate change effects have been very widely known should NOT be bailed out, and those that have owned sea front land since (say) 1980 or longer could be?
And then there is the argument that those who have had beach side Takapuna or Waiheke properties for 40+ years may have accrued enough benefit that society (or the ratepayer/taxpayer) owes them nothing.
Finally, the insurance companies will be huge players, and they have the power to unilaterally remove cover from properties eg Moana area of Thames and no doubt others in NZ are already affected. While they may reference the Auckland City work noted above, they are not bound by it and will be doing their own assessments.
I agree re cliff side bail outs, cases like Muriwai where there had been a moratorium on building but entitled people got the relevant paper work to over ride this, ironically these people have already been paid out well above c.v from what I hear and their properties are worthless, have no amenity value to the community as parks or walking trails & had put housing below at risk.
With parts of South, West and the North West issues have been exasperated by lack of storm water & waterway maintenance, intensive housing in flood plains, in the case of Kumeu, 7 hec, next to the river behind the shops was allowed to be filled by a developer for intensive housing. All Kumeu-Huapais storm water goes into the Kumeu river from thousands of new builds and SHAs. Adhock development without infrastructure and allowing of flood plain to be filled needs to stop. Prob not a good idea to be planting trees in floodways either which impedes water flow. The billion tree planting scheme is not being done mindfully, seems these organizations really seem to care about is the money under the guise of saving the planet imo.
Great to see this article from a clearly well-informed and passionate Councillor. Adaptation (including retreat) will either happen in a planned way or an unplanned way through the influence of banks and insurance companies as their risk becomes less tolerable.
I’d be interested to hear her thoughts on changes needed to political processes and statutory (and non statutory) processes to make progress on some of the topics discussed. There was some excellent work done by the expert working group on managed/planned relocation – what more can Auckland Council do to implement some of the recommendations (instead of waiting for central govt law makers)?