Right now, it’s Spring for us and Autumn/Fall for others up north, and strong equinoctial gales for both. Strong winds can be exhausting, sometimes damaging, occasionally disastrous.

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Facing the wind, handling the hazards

On Saturday, 11 September, 1880, the Evening Post reported that a terrible railway accident had occurred that morning in the Remutaka Ranges. Elsewhere in its pages, the newspaper reported that a “stiff NW wind blowing hard” was buffeting the region. Wellingtonians know what that means.

The train was heading to Wellington, from Featherston, and was climbing a steep, 1 in 15 section of the line just east of the crest of the Range, when at 11 am it was struck by a terrific gust of wind.

The locomotive, a Fell-system engine, remained in place, its horizontal cog wheels fiercely gripping the central castellated rail, but the carriages it had been pushing left the tracks, breaking free from the engine and tumbling many metres down the aptly-named Siberia gully. Four people died.

The rear wagons rolled back down the line under their own momentum, allowing the guard to raise the alarm at Cross Creek far below.

An even worse, wind-related, transport disaster was to affect the region eighty-eight years later, when on 10 April, 1968, the overnight Lyttelton to Wellington passenger ferry, the 9,000 ton Wahine, was beginning its regular, early morning entry to Wellington Harbour.

The weather, however, was anything but regular. In fact it was atrocious, with high seas, low visibility, and wind speeds reportedly reaching an extraordinary 185 km/hr.

Full control was lost and the ship struck and foundered on Barrett Reef at the harbour entrance. Heroic efforts were made to save the 734 passengers and crew, but eventually fifty-three people died.

The beached ship was only two years old, but it had to be written off and scrapped.

To the south, in Canterbury, very strong north-westerly winds can cause grief. In the 1 August 1975 storm, for example, light aircraft and a helicopter suffered severe damage, roofs were unpeeled, and cars were flattened by falling trees.

That day, I recall the astonishing sight of the work van flipped onto its roof while parked by the multi-storey building I worked in. Presumably a result of an intense down draft against the building.

It’s hardly surprising that New Zealand is windy, given its location, stuck out in the Pacific Ocean, adjacent to the tempestuous Southern Ocean, its mountains exposed to vigorous, midlatitude, globe-circling winds.

Our highest recorded wind speeds are about 250 km/hr, measured at Mount John, in Canterbury, and at Hawkins Hill, in Wellington. These are not much less than the globally most-extreme wind speeds, sometimes over 300 km/hr, recorded in tropical cyclones (a.k.a typhoons or hurricanes) and tornadoes.

Thankfully, by the time South Pacific tropical cyclones reach New Zealand, they have lost their high-speed cores, but they can still do a lot of damage.

Likewise, we do get the odd small tornado that tears off a few roofs, but nothing like the suburb-flattening monsters common in the southern US states.

Strong winds are a significant risk to forests. One study showed that an average annual wind damage of 1% (which some forests have experienced) could reduce a planted forest’s present net worth by up to 11%, owing to the lower revenues and higher harvesting costs.

On top of this, there’s the business cost of prematurely surrendering emissions trading units, and the loss of carbon reservoir for carbon dioxide mitigation.

However, the biggest disaster risk from wind comes from its role in wildfire in forests and scrublands. Strong winds raise temperatures, dry out vegetation, and transport showers of burning embers downwind to start new fires.

Massive summer bushfires are common in Australia and the US western states. The Palisades and Eaton fires in California, in January 2025, driven by strong, Santa Ana foehn winds, destroyed thousands of homes, causing total losses of about US$25 billion and major impacts on the insurance industry.

Strong north-westerly foehn winds were also a key factor in the razing of forty-eight homes in the South Island’s Lake Ōhau Alpine Village on 4 October 2020.

The Ōhau fire had started from a fault in an 11 kV electricity line. Fire and Emergency’s report concluded that “Vegetation, terrain, high temperatures and, in particular, severe winds, contributed to the rapid spread of this fire.”

Ominously, the latest Climate Change Commission assessment reported that wildfire incidence and area burned has increased in recent years. The big concern is that climate change is increasing the risk of fire, through rising temperatures and increased evaporation of soil moisture.

Thankfully, only minor changes are projected for strong winds. The few windiest days of the year are expected to be at most 3% more windy in southeastern parts of the South Island, and up to 4% less windy in places north of Auckland, by the end of the century.

That’s also good news for people using pedestrian crossings in Wellington.

Pedestrian blown away in Wellington, 21 October, 2025. Video: Justin Ashworth, various sources on Youtube

There you go, disaster risk reduction isn’t that difficult after all, is it? Just reduce our exposure and vulnerability to the hazard.

So let’s get organised to do it systematically for all natural hazards.

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It’s clear many people want answers to New Zealand’s excessive disaster problems. About 500 people across Substack and LinkedIn are now subscribers or read my weekly newsletter posts.

Today I’m setting out what I believe will be the main issues for disaster risk and its management over the coming months. If you don’t agree, say so, comment please!

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Thinking ahead – priority issues for disaster risk

Currently I see nine likely priorities for attention over the coming months.

1. Disaster events that hit the news. Events like the Mauao landslide tragedy make disaster risk real and visible; they reveal the shortcomings in risk governance and management, and they focus the minds of politicians (briefly) and the public on action to improve.

I expect the next twelve months will see a succession of floods, storms and landslides, and maybe some droughts and heatwaves now that the big El Niño is underway.

But hopefully no Mauao-type failures, and none of the monsters – such as a covid-type pandemic, foot and mouth disease outbreak, severe earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption.

2. Climate change and disasters will be linked. People recognise climate change as a high-profile concern needing serious action, and they often assume climate change is the cause of the weather disasters reported in the media.

But few are aware of our long history of similar disasters, nor of the long-established methods to manage disaster risks and reduce their impacts. These are ready-to-go tools for adapting to increases in extreme events.

So far, this perspective hasn’t been recognised even in the climate change community and government agencies. It’s going to take a lot more lobbying to clarify and assert the real facts of disaster risk and its management in official quarters.

3. Getting our heads around mental models. Risk is a tricky concept. The alternative concept of resilience is nice and can nudge people toward better management of risk.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget the key factors of risk, namely our exposure and vulnerability to hazards (remember the HEVI formula: Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impacts.)

Hazard science and emergency management are critical parts of the disaster picture, but if we prioritise only these, and neglect exposure and vulnerability, we will continue to increase disaster risks, lose lives and bleed national treasure.

4. Sharpening up our formal risk estimation. Disasters are highly diverse, ranging from frequent, small land-slips to extremely-rare but cataclysmic super-eruptions like the one that created Lake Taupō. How can we prioritise our attention and funding to such wildly-different types of risk?

The task is one of risk assessment – calculating the probability of an event occurring, and multiplying this by the likely impacts of the event.

It’s easier said than done though, as the impacts may cascade and multiply in unexpected ways, and good data on probability and on impacts are often not available. (Thanks to Peter L Collins who raised this priority in a comment last week.)

5. Trade-offs on earthquake risk. Government policies have swung wildly on this hugely costly issue. At stake are billions of dollars in cost for building and apartment owners, and potentially thousands of lives of building users.

Seismic experts are very concerned that we haven’t got the balance right. Were proper risk assessments and cost-benefit studies done? It’s an issue that needs much more transparent assessment, explanation and debate.

6. Grappling with the new planning and environment Acts. Local government staff across the country are working hard to understand these recently-passed Acts and to figure out how to implement them. It will take time to adjust.

The Acts continue to use the previous concept of natural hazard risk, with no reference to disaster risk, or risk reduction, so I don’t expect any significant advances on addressing our outsized disaster risks. But I could be very wrong; I hope that will be the case. We shall see.

7. Better disaster economics is needed. The headline costs of New Zealand’s disasters over recent decades appear to be at least $200 billion. That astonishingly huge sum, and the apparent lack of serious interest in it by successive governments, is what motivates my posts.

But we need more economics finesse than this. Does the $200 billion include all the cascading, downstream, long-term impacts on communities? How much could we have actually saved through better risk reduction policy? And what fraction of losses was not really “lost”, but actually ended up creating long-run benefits (e.g. newer, more-efficient factories in Christchurch)?

8. Flare-ups on risk compensation and insurance. In the past, insurance or government programmes have compensated for a big proportion of disaster losses. Think of the $256 million paid to farmers in compensation for the 185,000 animals slaughtered to contain the 2017 Mycoplasma Bovis outbreak, and the zillions provided to support businesses during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

But now, insurance premiums are rising everywhere, and are becoming unaffordable for some householders in risky locations. At the same time, the Government has signalled it doesn’t want to take responsibility for relocating settlements affected by climate change and sea level rise.

So the question is: who “owns” our various disaster risks, and who should bear the costs when disasters strike? The individual, the community or the state? Some serious thinking and innovative policy is needed here.

9. Moving faster on disaster risk governance. The current national governance arrangements for disaster risk are fragmented and ad hoc. What would a sensible governance arrangement look like?

It should have Ministerial leadership, legislative backbone, capacities for analysis and policy development, and an investment fund to systematically reduce risks.

That points to a Ministry for Disaster Risk Reduction, which would be a natural complement to the response-focussed Ministry for Civil Defence and Emergency Management.

For real progress, though, we also need the grunt of a semi-independent and expertise-led disaster risk commission. The Infrastructure Commission, the Climate Change Commission, and the Natural Hazards Commission show the way, and are great models to emulate or to expand upon.

P.S. As I noted last week, the Green Party and the Opportunities Party in their election proposals both propose to strengthen the Natural Hazards Commission to better deal with one part of the problem, namely the climate-related risks.

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Go on, do it, say what the priorities are, tell everyone what you really think.

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My assessment has been assisted by ChatGPT. You didn’t really expect me to thrash about in all those election-promise haystacks to find one or two disaster-related needles did you?

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Disaster risk addressed mainly via climate change policy

Political parties aim to please, and that means many flourishes and promises about dominant narratives, such as overstretched hospitals, rising costs of living, unemployment and crime. Climate change? Yep. Disaster risk? Nah. Not really.

Imagine: – if we could halve that $4 billion figure, we’d have enough left over to fund the whole budget of Foreign Affairs. Or, alternatively, the budgets of both Agriculture, Biosecurity, Fisheries and Food Safety and Arts, Culture and Heritage!

There’s nothing on offer that acknowledges the real reasons why people were killed in disasters like Cyclone Gabrielle’s floods and the Mt Maunganui landslides.

What does get traction is climate resilience – the concern that bad weather and floods are getting out of hand because of climate change, and that we need to be more resilient to these.

Here’s what I’ve found for the main parties, in rough order of vote share (Labour and National are about equal on around 29%). I’ve drawn on past documents, election materials, and party responses to the questions concerning climate and natural hazards prepared by the Science Media Centre.

National Party The Nats didn’t respond to the Science Media Centre’s questions, but their decisions in office offer a guide to the future. They have supported the national flood mapping project, have invested in flood protection works and roading resilience, and have committed to the Climate Adaptation Framework.

But they have also cancelled Labour’s national resilience fund, have reduced the funding for hazard science research and for hazard warning services, and have generally weakened climate change policies and commitments.

Labour Party Labour says they will fund work to respond to climate change and natural hazards. They point out that their $6 billion national resilience fund, set up after Cyclone Gabrielle mainly to deal with infrastructure repair and protection, was canned by the current government, though it’s not clear whether they intend to reinstate the fund.

In the past, Labour have supported the following: a risk-reduction approach to post-disaster recovery spending; the Climate Adaptation Framework; legislation for managed retreat; and long-term funding for adaptation. But I can’t locate anything specific on disaster risk on their website.

Green Party The Greens are strongly supportive of action on climate change, and want stable, long-term science funding and priorities on environmental pressures, climate change, natural hazards and resilience.

They say that adaptation costs shouldn’t be shouldered only by the most vulnerable, and they propose to expand the role of the Natural Hazards Commission to cover climate-related weather events and to more actively assist in the management of adaptation and retreat.

They also want to establish a dedicated fund for implementing climate adaptation and resilience measures, and to prioritise long-term, nature-based solutions over short-term engineering solutions.

NZ First Party NZ First have emphasised national economic resilience, for example by investing in fuel reserves and rail infrastructure, and they say they will ensure border protection agencies are resourced to prevent biological and biosecurity incursions.

However, the Party’s leader, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, last week directed New Zealand to join a tiny group of countries that did NOT vote for a long-negotiated United Nations international agreement on human pandemic preparedness. NZ First has generally sought to also reduce regulations and international commitments on climate change.

ACT Party ACT didn’t respond to the Science Media Centre’s questions and I see few signs of interest in disaster risk, apart from acknowledging the need for resilient infrastructure. They have welcomed the lowering of seismic strengthening standards for earthquake-prone buildings, on cost-effectiveness grounds (see here for an earlier post on this issue.)

On climate change, they wish to repeal the Zero Carbon Act and terminate the Climate Change Commission, and to reduce the costs of climate action, for farmers particularly, involved in meeting legislated requirements for emissions reduction.

Opportunity Party (TOP) Opportunity says they will fund prevention to avoid repeatedly paying for disaster recovery work. They have proposed several policies relevant to risk, mostly related to climate change, including a $5 billion climate resilience fund.

They also propose a property risk disclosure regime to support decision-making on homes, mortgages and insurance, and a national insurance support framework to manage the retreat of coastal and flood-prone communities.

They propose that the Natural Hazards Commission’s role should be expanded to include assessing national climate risk and coordinating hazard data for public use, as well as recommending adaptation targets and advising on solutions for communities that need resilience works or relocation.

My conclusions

None of the parties really understands the concept of disaster risk reduction, but they all embrace the idea of resilience.

There are big differences, however, in how they would deal with climate change, ranging from the Greens’ strong commitment, through to ACT and NZ First’s hands-off policies. The different approaches would have significant implications for disaster impacts and costs, in both the short term and the long term.

Beyond the burble and the mundane, I see the most important initiatives are three proposals that address the much-neglected issue of disaster risk governance:

• The establishment of a multi-billion dollar Resilience Fund (Opportunity, Greens, and maybe Labour.)

• The expansion of the Natural Hazards Commission to take on a proactive role in risk management (Greens, Opportunity.)

• The establishment of a national insurance support framework (Opportunity.)

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There’s plenty we can learn here for reducing risk right across the spectrum of all disaster types.

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Clean, green, the risks unseen

One of the iconic images of New Zealand is the sight of fresh green fields dotted with white sheep or idly-grazing cows.

Throughout the land, this scene repeats and repeats, as millions of farm animals undertake their dutiful roles, heads down, to serve the country’s multi-billion dollar food-production industries. To eat, and then to be eaten.

Export earnings from animal-based food production comprise more than half the country’s exports.

An industry to protect from disasters

Infectious animal diseases are the big worry. It’s not only the animal illness and death; it’s also the risk of being shut out of global food markets. In New Zealand, the risks of contagious diseases are managed under the 1993 Biosecurity Act.

Consider the much-feared foot and mouth disease, which affects cloven-hoofed animals in many countries. It’s an acute, febrile, and highly contagious viral illness. It has never occurred in New Zealand, but if it ever did, it would require the culling of herds and flocks, and a nationwide ban on exporting animal products.

Government agencies maintain high vigilance to prevent this disastrous possibility, including through periodic simulation exercises to refine disease preparedness and response capabilities.

Agriculture as villain, not just victim

In the reverse direction, agriculture and its four-legged millions can increase disaster risks for us two-legged millions.

That’s because the agriculture industry is so extensive – it’s the predominant use of our non-forested land, and is often very intensive, in terms of animal demands on farm ecosystems.

Specifically, think of deforestation, land degradation, landslides and erosion of hill country, wetland shrinkage and resulting flooding, aquifer depletion for irrigation, and water resources pollution, particularly from intensive dairy farming.

The textbook case is the government-promoted intensive sheep grazing on unstable, deforested hill country over the 1950s to 1980s, which has led to massive soil erosion and landslide damage during high rainfall events.

Lastly, there’s the problem of ruminant animals being a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gases, particularly methane. This is an excruciatingly difficult challenge for New Zealand, squeezed between the economic importance of its globally-efficient food industry and the global environmental impacts of that industry.

Weather-related hazards

Worldwide, disaster events like droughts and floods can be catastrophic for individual farmers, especially subsistence farmers, and if widespread, may cause cascading consequences for local and international market prices, and potentially famine, social unrest, and political upheaval.

In Europe this summer, heatwaves badly affected livestock, with milk deliveries declining by 5% – 10% across multiple countries and by as much as 25% for some Belgian farms.

Moving forward to the 2020s, the industry is better organised to manage drought, through earlier action to manage stock numbers and financial stresses, according to Beef+Lamb guru economist Rob Davison.

But the goalposts are shifting: over time, climate change will bring increased hazards to manage, such as more extreme temperatures and drought, higher rainfall and flooding, and potentially other changes in ecosystems and disease prevalence.

Managing disaster risk: the 2017 Mycoplasma Bovis outbreak

The bacterial animal disease Mycoplasma Bovis is one of the many disease terrors monitored by the Ministry of Primary Industries. It had never been seen in New Zealand until detected on a Southland farm in 2017, having probably arrived in an unmonitored cattle semen import.

The discovery caused consternation in the agricultural industry and great debate about whether to live with the disease and its costs, aiming at suppression only, or to go hard on an eradication programme that might never fully succeed.

In May 2018, the Government announced a 10-year eradication programme. Five years later, in August 2023, the programme reported the accumulated slaughter of 186,421 animals on 280 infected farms. The last detected cases occurred the following month, but surveillance continues to this day to verify the disease’s absence.

What agriculture can teach us for national disaster risk reduction

The agriculture industry is clearly well organised to manage and reduce its disaster risks from diseases and other natural hazards.

The key ingredients of this capability are: its strong science and technology basis; its well-organised farming and industry groups and partnerships; its ministerial leadership and funded budgets; and its legislative foundations, including the Biosecurity Act.

Contrast that with New Zealand’s overall disaster risk governance, which is fragmented and lacks coherent government leadership, as insurers have emphasised, and is weak on risk management capacities at high levels of Government, according to the Royal Commission into Covid-19.

With such shortcomings, it’s no wonder that disasters have cost us mind-boggling billions of dollars over recent decades. Think of the Christchurch earthquakes, Covid-19, and Cyclone Gabrielle.

P.S. I wonder if the 2018 Mycoplasma Bovis eradication programme influenced the same Government to go hard on eradication when first faced with the Covid-19 virus, just eighteen months later? Both cases proved to be effective disaster risk reduction strategies.

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A tale of unintended consequences: Europe and the Black Death

The plague, or Black Death, was a disaster of astonishing impact. First appearing in Central Asia, and arriving in Europe around 1347, it killed about a third of the population of the Middle East and Europe over the following decades.

Symptoms included painful and swollen lymph nodes (buboes), dark skin swellings, headaches, chills, fatigue and fevers. Eighty percent of infected people would die within a few days of the symptoms appearing.

Some regions lost more than half their population, while others were little affected. The larger, crowded towns and cities were most at risk, as were poorer sections of society. The initial epidemic around 1347 -1353 was followed by periodic resurgences in the following decades and centuries.

Worldwide, about 75 million people died of the plague over the 14^th century, and further millions were to die in waves over succeeding centuries.

A rat, a flea, a bacterium, a human

We now have a good idea of where the disease came from and how it spread. A big player was a small flea. We know that climate and drought were involved, and possibly a large volcanic eruption.

The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is commonly carried by ground rodents in many parts of the world.

The bacteria are transferred to fleas when the flea bites and feeds on an infected rodent, and then after multiplying in the flea’s gut, the bacteria are transferred to a person when bitten by the flea.

Though it’s more complicated than this, according to recent research, such as genomic research and modelling of infection dynamics. Apparently there’s still debate about the infection pathways, and what bit whom and when. Human lice may have been involved.

Historical accounts show that the European epidemic began in port cities in the Mediterranean, and then spread beyond, by maritime and overland transport.

The climate is implicated

Many studies have linked the major European plague outbreaks with drought and cooler weather conditions. As the figure below shows, the Northern Hemisphere’s Medieval Warm Period, which had lasted for several hundred years, was being replaced with a cooler regime called the Little Ice Age. Or perhaps, more accurately, the Little Cool Age.

The cooler conditions resulted in reduced crop production, frequent famines and widespread population loss for societies which had grown accustomed to the prosperity of the previous warmer era. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was the first of a series over the first half of the 14^th century.

But why was the plague linked to these famines?

How one disaster turned into another

A fascinating new theory published just last year by scientists Bausch and Büntgen, on the interlinking strands of climate, famine and the plague, proposes an answer to this question.

Their story begins with a very large volcanic eruption that occurred in 1345, probably in the Northern Hemisphere tropics, that blasted tons of sulphur dioxide gas high into the atmosphere, leading to a heavy veil of sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere.

The veiling of sunlight and resulting lower temperatures during the following summer cropping seasons resulted in poor harvests, grain shortages and famines in many parts of the Mediterranean region over 1345-1347.

In response, in 1347, the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa activated their trading networks to import grain from the Mongols of the Golden Horde, far to the east in regions north of the Black Sea. This trade helped to relieve starvation in many parts of Italy (as well as generating good profits for the shippers and traders no doubt.)

But the shipments also carried infected rats, fleas, and possibly already-infected seafarers, and so when the lifesaving-grain was finally delivered to the Italian ports, it was accompanied by animals of different types – rat, flea, human – bearing quantities of the death-dealing Yersinia pestis.

The world the plague made

Fast forward to the 15^th and 16^th centuries, and we find that the Black Death is having its own, huge, history-making consequence, according to historian James Belich (a New Zealander, by the way.)

In his recent, densely-argued book The world the plague made, Belich explores the plague’s roots, and explains that the decimation of populations by the plague created a basis for the long-term, post-medieval rebirth of West Eurasian society, the so-called “Great Divergence.”

It did this by shrinking the availability of labour, and thus increasing the average per-capita land and resource endowment of the remaining smaller population.

Over the many decades that followed, labour scarcity led to increased wages and disposable incomes, and a rise in demand for goods and services, as well as to the accelerated development of labour-saving technology, such as wind power and water power.

Lessons on disaster risk, 679 years later

• We humans are more closely entwined with the animal world than we typically think. The lowly flea delivered a devastating blow in 1347, just as the animal-mediated virus, Covid-19, also did in 2020.

• Think back to the harrowing images and testimonies of Covid-19 deaths piling up – including, ironically, in parts of Italy that had been decimated by plague centuries before. Imagine if, like the plague victims, we had no idea why we were dying.

• Disasters will continue to surprise us. The plague in the 14^th century suddenly appeared; as also did the huge Asian tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, Covid-19 in 2020, and the devastating flood in Nepal in August this year. The last one is never the last one.

• Disasters have consequences - some expected and some unintended. Ominously, extended climate shifts that affect food production, like the Little Ice age, have historically had disastrous, long-term effects. Global warming is already imposing such shifts.

• We’ve learned a lot over 679 years, and did a lot better in 2020 than in 1347, but it’s clear we still have a long way to go, to skewer disaster risks before they become a problem.

• That’s true for Governments, including ours, that have failed to establish comprehensive disaster risk governance.^* It’s even more true for certain political leaders who continually reject or undermine the sciences of climate, disease, and disaster.

^*Definition of disaster risk governance: “the institutions and processes through which national authority and leadership is exercised on risk” – a definition derived from the International Risk Governance Council.

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We see ourselves as the top dogs in the biosphere, but when it comes to disasters, we are more dependent on – and vulnerable to – other animals than you might think.

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The multiple roles of animals in disasters

Animals suffer and die in disasters, just as we human “animals” do. According to the World Animal Protection organisation, millions of animals worldwide are injured or killed each year from floods, droughts, wildfire and heatwaves. Many more again will die of epidemic disease, another form of disaster risk.

This is a significant category of disaster risk that few people ever think about.

It’s not just a matter of economics. The relationships between animals, humans and disasters are complex, not least because of our ethical and emotional wishes to protect animals from harm, especially pet animals and endangered species like New Zealand’s many unique birds and Australia’s koala.

We also want to (and absolutely need to) preserve and protect ecosystems and animal biodiversity, and at the same time, to guard against the transfer of infectious diseases from wild animals to livestock and to humans.

Then there’s the biggest disaster of all – climate change – where ruminant livestock are globally a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane.

Changes in climate will increase disaster risks, and will alter ecosystems, animal habitat, populations and infectious diseases.

Cooked poultry

On 7 February, 1973, 26,000 chickens reportedly died at poultry farms near Christchurch, a result of unusually high temperatures. That was the day New Zealand’s record highest temperature, 42.4°C, was set in nearby Rangiora.

But this was paltry compared to the estimated death toll of 2.5–3 million chickens across France in 2026, when temperatures soared over 40°C, setting new records in heatwaves that were egged on by climate change.

Comforting thoughts

For many people, the most important animals in the world are their pets, their moggies and doggies and budgies. Animals provide comfort and companionship, and in some cases essential services, as with guide dogs for the blind.

During this year’s European heatwaves, there were reports from Paris that veterinary services were overwhelmed by pets – mostly dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits – animals sharing in the heat stress alongside their owners, and similarly suffering, in some cases to the point of death.

Here in New Zealand, veterinarians have assembled a great resource on preparing for disasters and protecting animals in disasters.

But for those people with a pet American possum, they may prefer the tailored advice in the video below.

A bad case of the flu

Of more concern than pearls of wisdom on possum preparedness, is the current global pandemic of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or A(H5) bird flu, which kills over 75% of the birds infected.

In the United States, the disease has spilled over from wild birds to commercial poultry farms. Over a thousand commercial flocks have been culled, with the loss of over 200 million birds – about 4% of the poultry population – since the outbreak began in 2022.

The virus has also spread to some dairy herds – and to humans. Sporadic human cases have been found among US poultry and dairy workers, according to the US Centres for Disease Control, though they say the current public health risk is low.

The virus has been detected recently in wild birds in New Zealand, but not in the poultry industry to date. A prevention and response plan has been established for the industry, and the Department of Conservation has begun a vaccination programme for the country’s most-threatened endangered bird species, such as the kakapo and the takahe.

Covid-19’s animal origins

After emerging in late 2019, the Covid-19 virus quickly spread among the global human population, and it is still circulating and killing people. Did it originate from wild animals, as most novel viruses do?

An international scientific group convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.” (Though it did not totally rule out the lab-leak hypothesis.)

Covid-19 was the world’s biggest disaster of natural origin for a hundred years, after the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed perhaps 50 million people.

We may never know precisely where and how the Covid-19 virus originated, but animals were almost certainly somewhere in its evolutionary chain, and animals are likely to remain the primary sources of future global pandemics.

The wrap-up: lessons for the day

It’s a mixed bag.

On the one hand, the Ministry for Primary Industries, Department for Conservation, and the poultry industry seem to be right on the case with the bird flu, reflecting the agriculture industry’s well-organised approach to risk.

On the other hand, the Royal Commission into Covid-19 concluded (irrespective of the virus’s animal or laboratory origin) that risk management capacities at high levels of Government were deficient and needed strengthening across strategic capacity and planning, legislation, and economic and social analysis.

This theme, of strengths here, and weaknesses there, of fragmented disaster risk governance and lack of coherent government leadership on disasters, is much wider than just these animal examples – it’s something that insurers also have been beating the drum about for ages.

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Under the Government’s 2024 Fast Track legislation, a huge proposal has been approved to build thousands of homes and other buildings in South Auckland – on a flood plain!

Auckland City says no way. They object to the proposal on several grounds, especially on the flood risk involved.

(For overseas readers – Auckland is New Zealand’s biggest city, has a fantastic green-blue geographic situation, and a population of about 1.5 million.)

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Fast-track development – a new and faster way to grow our disaster risks

It’s not surprising that Auckland’s authorities are acutely wary of flood risk, following the 27 January 2023 flash flood disaster which claimed 4 lives and cost at least $2 billion.

The rainfall was unusually high, for sure, but the real eye-opener was the extent of urban exposure and vulnerability to the rainfall.

Three years on, and this week Auckland Council is in a tussle in The High Court over a greenfield land development proposal, the Sunfield project, which the Council believes will increase the city’s flood risks.

The Sunfield proposal by Winton Land Limited aims to develop a 3,854-home community including three retirement villages, a school and a commercial centre on 244 hectares in South Auckland, between Takanini and Papakura.

It’s a massive project for Auckland that has been advanced under the Government’s largely-untested, pro-development “fast-track” planning legislation.

The fast-track route is intended to promote “regionally and nationally significant” projects – by bypassing the usual planning processes managed by cities and other local government.

The Government decides which proposals to accept into the fast-track process and then appoints a small “Expert Consenting Panel” for each, to quickly review the proposal and decide if it should go ahead.

The Sunfield proposal was vigorously criticised by the Auckland Council and its subsidiary organisations Auckland Transport and Watercare Services, on both substantive grounds (including flood risk) and procedural grounds.

Here’s my précis of what the City had to say on the risk aspects.

The City was also very critical of other aspects of the proposal related to transportation, urban form, community consultation, and consistency with Auckland’s longstanding development plans.

Overall, they concluded that the proposal’s adverse impacts would significantly outweigh its benefits.

An even more pungent assessment was made by natural hazards planning expert, Professor Bruce Glavovic of Massey University’s School of People, Environment and Planning. He described the greenfield development as “dumb”, and literally a “recipe for disaster.”

Despite these multiple, concrete objections, the three-person consenting panel approved the proposal on 10 March 2026.

The current High Court appeal is a desperate, last ditch stand by Auckland Council against the proposal and the “fast-track” policies of a development-mad central Government.

But don’t expect any planning miracles from the case. Civil appeals under section 99 of the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 can be made only on questions of law, not on the substance of the Panel’s decision.

This means that any fault or problem in substance is baked into the legislation’s processes, and can only be reversed by amendments to the legislation. So Auckland is probably stuck with whatever the panel has approved, forever.

Which is why both the Mayor of Auckland and the Mayor of Queenstown wrote to Infrastructure Minister and fast-track maestro, Chris Bishop, last month, to call for an immediate pause on fast-tracked greenfield housing developments. With an election just seven weeks away, Mr Bishop will be squirming from this attack.

Adding to the drama are the ructions in Winton Land’s management, with several defections this year of board members and senior staff, including two board chairs. The second chair was Steven Joyce, a former Minister of Finance and National Party member, who was hired to help resolve the company’s problems, but who quit after only seven weeks in the job!

Winton’s senior counsel also resigned – on the opening day of the current High Court case!

Many observers have also acidly noted that the developer has been a generous donor to the National Party.

Backing up a minute, the reason we have planning and consenting processes is to finesse the myriad of issues that concern the public – our safety, financial interests and wellbeing, including functions such as transportation, utilities, amenities like green spaces, and environmental, social, cultural, historical assets.

We want our cities and communities to be great places to live, thriving, attractive and safe, both now and in the future, and we expect our elected local government officials to work hard to achieve this, particularly through planning and regulation.

The fast-track process may indeed speed up planning decision-making for major projects, but this is largely achieved by shrinking the evaluation of pros and cons, and by side-lining those best-placed to review public impacts and help improve a project’s design, namely experienced and expert local government staff.

In effect, the fast-track planning process degrades to “planning by developer and small Government-appointed technical panel.”

The fast-track legislation adds yet another factor to the already pervasive fragmentation and weakness of New Zealand’s disaster risk governance.

We’ve suffered enormous impacts and financial losses from disasters of various types over recent decades, but our laws and public agencies still skirt around the problem.

The case of Kumeū, illustrated above, shows what’s at stake. The town has slowly developed since its beginnings in the 1870s, and like many towns in New Zealand that have grown up near rivers, it is now chronically at risk of flooding. The risk is built-in.

After the 2023 flood, Auckland Council found that a large-scale stormwater upgrade for Kumeū is not a viable solution; all they can do is carry out routine stream and stormwater maintenance to handle regular rain events.

Minister Bishop has repeatedly expressed his desire to rapidly “put spades in the ground” on major development projects.

Efficient decision-making is desirable, of course, but not at the cost of partnering with flaky developers on multi-billion-dollar projects or creating Kumeū-type situations that leave communities and local government to clean up the mess when the next flood disaster inevitably strikes.

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But I need to follow up on last week’s post, Tantrums in the sky, on how New Zealand’s extreme rainfalls and disaster risks may be changing as a result of climate change. I’m concerned that climate change worries may be misleading us on the long-known fundamentals of disaster risk and how to reduce disaster impacts.

It requires a long view, as we will see.

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Big storms and floods are nothing new. But is climate change now showing its hand?

Wright Street, Wellington, illustrated above, has seen flooding before, but the deluge on 20 April 2026 was greater than most could remember. The peak one-hour rainfall was reported to be a whopping 85 mm.

Back in April, when I first commented on the flood, I emphasised that high rainfall is only a problem because people and their stuff are exposed underneath it and vulnerable to it.

Recall the “HEVI” formula: Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impact.

My message was that to deal with high rainfalls, now and in the future, we needed to shrink the exposure and the vulnerability factors. With bigger capacity drains in Wright Street, for example. Or by stabilising the landslide-prone hill slope behind your house.

Surprisingly, then, the latest IPCC report (page 1559) says that this increased-rainfall effect hasn’t shown up in New Zealand daily rainfall data, though it’s evident in some places overseas. I said much the same thing in last week’s post, drawing on the Ministry for the Environment “sprinkles” map of trends in daily rainfall (Figure 6, at left) below.

But daily rainfall is a bit crude for measuring storm rainfalls, as one subscriber has pointed out. So today I’m adding the data for annual maximum one-day rainfall (Figure 7, on right), which should pick up on the prolonged “atmospheric river” events that mainly cause New Zealand’s extensive flooding.

By comparing the maps, you can see there’s actually not much difference between the trends for the two types of data. So last week’s conclusions mostly still apply.

Now, getting a bit technical: the StatsNZ study found that the trends in the annual one-day maximums around the country were split roughly 50:50, ranging from plus 4.7 mm per decade for Hokitika down to minus 4.3 mm per decade for Tauranga. The average of the trends, 0.2 mm per decade, represents a total rise of 1.2 mm nationwide over the study’s six decades of data. Not a lot when compared to typical maximum one-day falls of 100 mm.

In other words, there’s little sign of an upward trend in the biggest one-day rainfalls we’ve measured over 1960-2022. And if it’s not showing up in the rain gauges, why should we think it’s the significant factor in our big flood disasters?

I’m puzzled by all this. It’s not what I expected. Presumably the study method is not up to the task, and that other data types and research techniques are needed.

But if so, why hasn’t the Ministry for the Environment pointed this out, and moderated its worrying stance that “Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe.”

The problem is that a dramatic public message like this leads people to think that recent storms and disasters are a result of climate change. Worse, from my point of view, it obscures the real causes of the disasters – poorly-managed exposure and vulnerability to heavy rain.

For temperature extremes, the changes are quite clear. As temperatures rise, there are more really-hot conditions, and fewer really-cold conditions, so temperature measurements readily allow the “more frequent and severe” label. Certainly so in Europe, whose extreme heatwaves this year have the fingerprint of climate change on them.

But rainfall is a different beast. Long-past historical records show numerous occasions when rainfalls and floods were as bad as recent events, typically a result of remnant tropical cyclones and atmospheric river events in late summer.

For example, a hundred years ago, in early April 1924, the Kaipara district north of Auckland was badly flooded, with one source indicating a rainfall intensity of 380 mm over a seven hour period.

Then in early February 1936, a huge storm affected most of the North Island, with one report of about 300 mm of rainfall recorded in 24 hours at Whangarei.

In the mid-1990s I saw an astonishing rainfall record from a West Coast rain-gauge where intense rainfall, of about 50 mm per hour, continued hour after hour, as warm moist air roared in from the Tasman Sea and had its moisture wrung out as it ascended the Southern Alps. The day’s total rainfall was over 500 mm I recall.

Around that time, within the Alps south of Hokitika at Cropp River, hydrologists were measuring extraordinary rainfalls, including a maximum one-hour fall of 104 mm and a maximum one-day fall of 701 mm. Their equipment even included a three-metre-high drainpipe, tall enough to capture the total rainfall that fell between periodic helicopter servicing trips!

Given this historical context, the 250 mm one-day rainfalls in Auckland’s 27 January 2023 flood look somewhat less exceptional. It was a shocking disaster but mainly it highlighted the city’s extensive, unmanaged urban disaster risk, from its excessive exposure and vulnerability to rainfall.

Over decadal time scales, we can expect extreme rainfalls to vary somewhat, under the influence of big-picture, seasonal-climate phenomena, like El Niño/La Niña, and other slowly-varying decadal variations.

For example, a recent study of record New Zealand rainfalls found an unusually high number of extreme events over the period 1921-1940 (this would include the big 1924 and 1936 events I mentioned above.)

Seeing these long-forgotten historical storms, the recent high-rainfall storms in recent years don’t look that unusual anymore.

Additional evidence comes from a fascinating new modelling study that simulated 3,226 years of New Zealand climate at current greenhouse gas levels, to see how the rainfall extremes behaved over the long term. By sampling successive 100-year periods, the researchers determined the “worst-in-century” rainfall event in each period, a sort of “worst-in-living-memory” event.

Here’s the interesting bit: the size of these worst-in-century events varied widely between the different 100-year periods. In some, the maximum rainfall was relatively modest, while in others it was truly exceptional, relative to the whole 3,226 year record. The average recurrence intervals varied from 25 years to 5,000 years.

This is pretty scary for hydrological engineers designing drains and stop banks. Currently, they use rainfall records from only the last 100 years, but this period might overestimate – or worse, underestimate – the real, long-term risk they should be designing for.

It also muddies our question about detecting long term trends. A natural fluctuation of extreme events over the last 50-100 years might easily counteract the predicted increase in extreme rainfalls from unnatural climate change.

Conversely, it shows how untenable it is to assume that any high-rainfall storm event is evidence of climate change.

This is tough article to summarise. But here goes, first on climate change:

Now on the pressing problem of disaster risk:

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It’s a big, tough issue – this is the first of two posts on the topic.

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More-extreme rainfall and disasters: time to get the story right

The media are very clear about it: storm rainfalls are increasing and are causing more damage and worse disasters, and it’s because of climate change. It’s the narrative you see virtually every day.

It’s also the official advice, from the Ministry for the Environment, as prominently stated in its Our Atmosphere and Climate 2023 report: “extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe.”

Climate change is in the dock: it’s been found guilty of numerous worldwide climate crimes already, such as increasing global temperatures and rising sea levels.

But is it guilty of the crime of more frequent and severe extreme weather in New Zealand?

When we talk about extreme weather, we usually mean bad stuff – high-impact events like thunderstorms, strong winds, high rainfall, and maybe icy temperatures. Events that cause a lot of damage and many insurance claims.

You can’t directly measure weather; instead you have to measure its elements – wind, rainfall, temperature. Rainfall’s the key problem for disasters, and it has a simple link to climate change, as follows.

A basic fact of physics is that warmer air can carry more water vapour, by about 7% per extra degree (known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship.)

Since New Zealand’s temperatures have risen by about 1.3 degrees over the last century, it means there’s potentially more water vapour up there, by about 9%, ready to be dumped on us when it rains.

Not only that, when the extra water vapour condenses as rain, it also releases extra heat, which helps rev up the intensity of a storm and deliver even bigger, more extreme downpours.

Climate change models incorporate this physics, of course. For example, a recent modelling study led by a Waikato University research group estimated that New Zealand’s current level of warming would have been enough to have caused February 2023’s Cyclone Gabrielle to produce 10% more rainfall and 20% higher peak hourly rainfall than if it had occurred in our past, cooler era before global warming.

Another modelling study from this group looked at future New Zealand rainfalls under different future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Under their “moderate” emissions scenario, three-day rainfalls would increase by 4 - 15%, while one-day rainfalls would increase by 7 - 18%. Under their “high” emissions scenario, three-day rainfalls would increase by 5 - 24%, while one-day rainfalls would increase by 8 - 28%.

So the case is proven then? Not quite.

The model-based predictions are for future conditions, many decades ahead, and are crucial evidence for why we need to urgently cut greenhouse emissions.

Whereas the Ministry for the Environment is talking about extreme weather conditions now and in the recent past.

Presumably that means rainfall increases are already evident in our historical rainfall data? In fact, that’s not so.

Consider the results of the study by the Government Statistician (Stats NZ), commissioned by the Ministry, of long-term rainfall trends at thirty sites over 1960-2022, as shown below in what I call the “sprinkles” maps (like kid’s biscuits.)

You can see that the colours are widely scattered – only about half the sites actually show an increase in rainfall. Also, I found that the average of the trends is only 0.3 % per decade, about a third of what would be expected from our past warming trend via the Clausius-Clapeyron effect.

Note how Kerikeri’s annual rainfall (right figure, top-most red dot) is shown as “very likely increasing” while for Whangarei, only 75 km away to the southeast, it’s the opposite, as “very likely decreasing.” Clearly, there’s a lot more going on with rainfall than just climate change.

Separately, a group of local scientists commissioned by the Ministry to summarise the most recent 2021 IPCC Assessment report, had this to say about rainfall: “for the most part, the trends in New Zealand have been classified as statistically not significant.”

And to top it off, another study from Waikato University, of rainfall data for 307 stations having over 70 years of data, concluded that “Our results yield no clear historical trend in the frequency of extreme daily rainfall events nationwide.”

No trends evident then, though the map does suggest a broad-brush spatial pattern, which the Ministry’s report describes as: The south is becoming wetter and the north and east are becoming drier.”

But please beware of that sneaky word “becoming”! It implies that the 1960-2022 statistics will continue into the future.

That’s a step too far. A past trend is not a prediction. Rainfall patterns and trends can change from decade to decade, and even century to century, as a result of El Niño/La Niña events and other more-slowly varying decadal variations. But that’s a topic for another post.

Summing up, there’s strong evidence that climate change will increase rainfalls in future, but New Zealand’s rainfall data does not support the claim that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe.

Even if the claim were partly true, the court does not have sufficient evidence to convict climate change of causing our flood disasters. Not yet. Case dismissed.

P.S. Next week I plan to highlight yet another study from the Waikato University group, that simulates rainfall over 3,226 years of New Zealand climate at current greenhouse gas levels. It’s brilliant. Extreme events exposed.

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This is not some esoteric, abstract concern; the brutal Nepal flood disaster this week, possibly linked to climate warming effects on glaciers in the Himalayas, shows us what’s at stake.

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Why is disaster risk reduction so neglected in climate change adaptation?

New Zealand’s climate is changing and we need to be ready for what’s to come. Especially for the expected increases in the extreme weather and climatic conditions that can lead to disaster events.

Key concerns are heavy rainfall, floods and landslides, natural phenomena that have long threatened society, and that we try to keep at bay with risk-reducing practices, like early warning systems, drainage works, river management, and land use rules.

It was the massive impacts of the exceptionally-heavy rainfalls of early 2023 in the North Island that really set the climate-change alarm bells ringing.

An authoritative study of February 2023’s Cyclone Gabrielle found that a 1.0°C climate warming – similar to New Zealand’s current situation – would have been enough to have caused the storm to dump 10% more rainfall and produce 20% higher peak hourly rainfall than otherwise.

At the same time, do note that Cyclone Gabrielle itself was not caused by climate change. Devastating summer cyclones like this happen from time to time – for example Giselle in 1968 and Bola in 1988. Gabrielle was yet another, but it was made worse by climate change.

How we deal with the expected growth of disaster risk from climate change is one of the tasks of our National Adaptation Plan.

Progress on the plan has been mixed, however, according to the just-released biennial assessment of progress by the Climate Change Commission. Too slow, uneven and poorly coordinated, they say.

The main barriers are uncertain resources and inadequate governance. The Commission calls on the Government to take a stronger lead on the fundamentals – legislation, funding, planning and tool development.

Read between the lines – the Government is winging it. It doesn’t seem particularly motivated by climate change and would prefer to shed responsibility for adaptation onto poorly-resourced local government.

From my perspective there’s another big problem: the lack of recognition in the Commission’s report of disaster risk reduction as a necessary and potent approach for climate change adaptation.

Disaster risk reduction gets only three passing mentions in the report. The same neglect occurred in the Commission’s earlier 2026 Climate Change Risk Assessment.

Overall, it seems to me that the Climate Change Commission is misreading common, garden-variety, disaster risk.

This is the disaster risk that has always been with us, not from climate change, but from dumb construction and land use, the abuse of the environment, and poor preparedness, in the face of well-known hazards like storms, earthquakes and viruses.

It’s the long-known risk that has inspired the development of the established field of disaster risk reduction over many decades, and it’s the target of the 2015 United Nations Sendai Framework, an international consensus on how to reduce disaster risk and losses, in lives, livelihoods and health and in countries’ economic, social, and environmental assets.

In New Zealand, it’s the risk that has translated into losses of billions of dollars to the economy over recent decades.

Insurers understand what’s involved. In a major study on disaster impacts, IAG argues that the growing costs of disasters in New Zealand arise mainly from institutional and policy shortcomings in how we understand and manage our exposure and vulnerability to existing natural hazards.

That’s why the central task of disaster risk reduction is the management and reduction of exposure and vulnerability.

However, the Climate Change Commission views it differently, like this: “more frequent, severe and unpredictable climate impacts … are damaging homes, disrupting lives, and raising cost pressures on communities, infrastructure and local economies.” This language loosely implies that our disaster woes are primarily the result of changes in climate.

The Commission further embellishes its climate-oriented narrative by stating that “the annual cost of recovery from natural hazards, including climate change, is about $4 billion.” Actually, this is not so.

In 2024, public disaster recovery spending maxed at about $3 billion, mainly as a result of the exceptional 2023 weather events, but over the twelve years before then, the average cost of recovery was only about $0.5 billion per year (earthquakes not included), as shown in a study by consultant Sapere for IAG.

I think the Commission’s $4 billion figure derives from a 2025 Treasury study which found the average annual cost of economic shocks (largely from disasters) over several decades has been about 1% of GDP, equivalent to $4 billion per annum.

But most of this cost was a result of the Covid epidemic and the Canterbury-Marlborough earthquakes. Weather-related costs were at most a tenth of the total, and the climate change effect would be some fraction of that lesser figure.

My conclusion is that, in its eagerness to energise climate action, the Climate Change Commission has unduly highlighted the impacts and costs of all types of disasters, to bolster the case for adaptation, while at the same time, it has largely ignored established international lessons on how to reduce those impacts and costs.

It’s a big puzzle why this is, given that disaster risk reduction offers proven, quickly-implemented solutions, particularly for adaptation’s big concern about extreme weather events like the 2023 storms.

Climate change is a monstrous problem, a cancer on the Earth of our own making, and its impacts will grow inexorably in future.

Adapting to that future will inevitably require the intense application of disaster risk reduction concepts and practices. The Climate Change Commission needs to quickly wake up to this fact.

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Commissioned by Tauranga City Council and undertaken by retired judge Hon. Paul Davison, the review covers only the limited, specific concerns that the Council wrote into the Terms of Reference.

At the same time, it highlights the bigger, unexamined problem - how New Zealand’s weak governance of national disaster risks contributed to the event.

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Landslide disaster was preventable; responsibility yet to be determined

Retired judge Hon. Paul Davison’s External Review of the Mt Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park landslide disaster in which six people died was commissioned by the Tauranga City Council. It is one of five official enquiries being undertaken into this tragedy.

The key finding is no surprise: the disaster was preventable. Preventable not just in a theoretical sense, but in actual practice. It wasn’t an accident; it should never have happened.

The Review elaborates the many, sorry mis-steps in practice that led to this outrageous failure of prevention.

Mr Davison says that the hazard was well-known; that an effective and inexpensive means of managing the risk had twice been recommended; and that the Council had had every opportunity to put it in place.

Nevertheless, he also finds that no-one “did anything intentionally or deliberately wrong” and that no-one’s “acts or omissions caused the tragic deaths.”

Interesting, judicious wording. So where’s the accountability then?

In a post just after the event, I said the landslide was a tragedy that demanded national action, and that post-disaster inquiries usually focus on short-range management failures, and fail to address the context of inadequate politics, laws and policies that set the scene for disasters.

This is indeed the case for the External Review.

But bear in mind the review was commissioned by the Tauranga City Council and was limited to assessing the Council’s risk management and Emergency Operations Centre.

As you might expect of an experienced High Court Judge, Mr Davison has provided a thorough account of what happened and why, and what the Council should do in response to get its house in order.

The 40-page section which describes how the event unfolded, based on evidence from individuals and formal records, is an invaluable resource for all involved and for the conduct of further reviews and research.

The Review’s recommendations cover both risk management systems and emergency response management.

Those on risk management boil down to the need for a much better, professional disaster-risk management capability within the Council.

Nothing difficult, just standard things like risk assessments and monitoring of known hazards, proper recording and archiving of reports, and mandatory recording and response to identified risks.

What’s astonishing - and frankly dismaying - is that we haven’t learned and implemented these basic practices after two hundred years of living with our stormy, quaky, volcanic, hazard-scape.

It’s likely that many of New Zealand’s 11 regional councils and 67 territorial authorities will share Tauranga’s failings.

And there’s a core, big-picture reason we are so bad at this disaster stuff.

It’s because New Zealand’s national governance of disaster risk is so poor.

There’s no national-level leadership focussed on reducing disaster risk (as distinct to managing emergencies.) There’s no overarching policy to address disaster risks and no plan with targets to manage and shrink these risks.

Funding for risk reduction is minimal compared to spending on disaster response and recovery, and there’s no national system for monitoring and quality assurance on the risk management work done by local government.

Similar conclusions were made by the inquiry into the Covid-19 disaster.

It’s hardly surprising that Tauranga didn’t have what Mr Davison calls for – “single, accountable ownership of risk” – when this ownership of risk is so clearly absent at national level in central government.

It’s also not helped by the same central government dictating what local government can and can’t do, and tightly limiting the funding available for risk management.

Not just the current government, but all the previous governments that have coasted along for years, paying minimal attention to the lessons of past disasters, inquiry after inquiry, and neglecting the advice of scientists and risk experts and all the international evidence and guidelines in UN accords such as the Hyogo and Sendai Frameworks.

So much is known about landslides - they are one of our most common hazards - yet we have no national policy or action to monitor and control their risks.

Landslide experts were outspoken and highly critical of this shortcoming, as I reported in a second post on the Mauao event a week later.

Another four reviews of the landslide tragedy are underway, by the Coroner, WorkSafe, New Zealand Police, and central government.

The central government review, led by another retired judge, Hon Sir Mark O’Regan, and managed by the Department of Internal Affairs, will be the most comprehensive.

Its wider scope will allow it to look at relevant legislative, administrative, and policy settings – but only if they played an important role in causing the fatal landslides.

There’s no doubt that years of absent central government ownership of New Zealand’s disaster risk did indeed play an important role in the Mount Maunganui / Mauao disaster.

Sir Mark and his team need to recognise and highlight this fundamental cause.

By doing so, their review could save many lives and many billions of dollars in future. It could be the most important outcome of the inquiry.

P.S. The deadline for submissions to the central government review has been extended by three weeks - I think that means until 1 September. No, I’ve now seen on the submissions page it closes 4 September.

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Japan has long experience of these amazing phenomena – tsunami is a Japanese word, after all – and it has well-developed strategies to deal with them. Though the massive tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011, put even Japan’s capabilities to the test.

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Defending against a big Hikurangi tsunami: lessons from Japan

Big tsunamis are very rare, but we’ve seen two monsters in recent times: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

Scarily, our Hikurangi Subduction Zone east of the North Island has the capacity to generate an event of similar magnitude.

I posted on this risk issue last year – you can find more technical background there.

How can we avoid or reduce the damage and loss of life? It depends on everyone – central and local government particularly, but also you.

Japan offers potent lessons. Remember the image in last week’s post showing tsunami water pouring into Japan’s Miyaki City, Iwate Prefecture, on 11 March, 2011? The carpark was flooding and some people were about to run away. Here’s what happened in just 45 seconds.

Create pictures in your head

Back to New Zealand. Try to imagine what might happen if a tsunami paid a visit where you live, work or regularly visit.

Even small tsunamis can do a lot of damage, and they move fast. So it’s good to have pictures in your mind of what you would do in an event. And to have done a little preparation beforehand.

Check out the tsunami inundation zones and the escape routes, such as those for Gisborne (see below.) Go for a walk, or run, along some of these routes. Tell yourself escape stories. Tell others as well.

Act on any warnings immediately

The official advice: if you feel an earthquake that’s long and strong, that’s warning enough. Get gone!

Public, science-based warnings, based on high-tech tsunami models, are quickly generated from the initial earthquake data, and are broadcast to all mobile phones in the region and on radio and TV channels.

Time is short. If it’s a Hikurangi event, there might be as little as ten or fifteen minutes before the rising sea water arrives at the coast, so instant response is essential.

Warning accuracy is not guaranteed; the event may end up as a fizzer – but who wants to dice with death? Don’t argue, just move, asap. ASAP!

Climbing and running away is wise; driving sometimes works, swimming definitely not

If there’s a nearby hill or slope, climb it quickly. The upper levels of a multi-floor reinforced concrete building may be a good bet too.

Rising, rushing, tsunami water moves fast. Vehicles can move faster, but not when hundreds of other vehicles are trying to go down the same road. If there’s a traffic jam, get out and run.

Don’t imagine you can swim. No one can survive in the strong turbulent currents with all the stuff swept up by the dirty seawater: rubbish, building debris, furniture, fences, gas tanks, vehicles, sometimes boats and whole houses.

For drivers, here’s a video of what happened to that white vehicle (18 seconds).

Now, let’s consider what can be done by communities, local government and central government.

Document, memorialise, keep the memory alive

At the edge of the bay across the road from the Houraikan Inn, in Unosumai, there’s a tall granite memorial to the 2011 tsunami. It includes this compelling message in Japanese and English:

“Just run! Run uphill! Don’t worry about the others. Save yourself first. And tell the future generations that a tsunami once reached this point. And that those who survived were those who ran. Uphill. So run! Run uphill!” (See Basher and Ono, 2022.)

It’s heartfelt advice. The people who ran up the hill behind the Houraikan Inn on March 11 will always remember. Here’s a few seconds of their harrowing experience, viewed from the hill.

For local government: Avoid building houses and other stuff in tsunami risk zones.

In Japan, many ancient memorial stones record past tsunamis. One at Aneyoshi, Iwate, is inscribed as follows:

“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

But it’s easy to forget, even in Japan, when years and decades pass without incident. More so in New Zealand where the only recorded tsunami of any note was the minor event in 1960 generated by an earthquake thousands of kilometres away in Chile.

Defend critical facilities, build in safety, or relocate

Inevitably, there will be buildings and facilities in tsunami risk zones that are exposed to tsunami risk, like ports and marinas, and beach resorts.

Engineered defences range from simple embankments, stairways up hills, and elevated escape platforms, through to heavily engineered structures such as the seawall and floodgate protecting Fudai, Iwate Prefecture.

Are there any critical facilities like schools, daycare and aged care facilities, clinics, present in New Zealand’s tsunami zones? If so, serious consideration should be given to relocating them to safer places.

For central government: be wary, be organised

The Director General of JMA, Japan’s Meteorological Agency, once told me that the worst part of his job was his annual meeting with the Prime Minister and cabinet to brief them on the likelihood of big earthquakes and tsunamis (a JMA responsibility), particularly near Tokyo and other cities.

The message was always bad: the chances are high, and the impacts will be catastrophic.

Unlike New Zealand, Japan’s governance of disaster risks is comprehensive and thorough. Since 1961, its Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act has guided action by government agencies. Annual “White Papers” are prepared to report to parliament (the Diet) on the year’s disasters and on programmes and progress on long-term risk reduction.

Last month, on 13 July, the system was further upgraded, with a new law to establish a 352-person central disaster management agency that will be overseen by a Minister directly responsible to the Prime Minister.

Partly this move was to better enforce cooperation across the many silos of government that deal with different parts of the disaster risk problem.

This rings a few bells here in New Zealand, doesn’t it?

Legislation? Reporting to Parliament? A Minister in charge? Enforced collaboration across silos in government? Funded programmes? Nope, nope, nope, nope.

Why not?

Well, when, then?

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For me, it highlights the need to pay close attention to post-event impact processes if we are to cut the total envelope of a disaster’s losses.

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The long tail of cascading, accumulating impacts

We all know that in a disaster, the bad stuff doesn’t stop the moment the shaking stops or the flood water recedes.

So much happens thereafter, as the effects ripple and ricochet throughout the disrupted communities and beyond, and the impacts grow and accumulate. Think about how Tairāwhiti is still bruised by 2023’s Cyclone Gabrielle.

This view was underlined by a recent thought-piece by Dunedin-based systems scientist Annal Dhungana, who argues for a “systems” view of disasters, and for the use of systems thinking and techniques to manage and reduce the impacts.

To explain the ideas, Dhungana reaches forward to the year 2032 to imagine a hypothetical major rupture of New Zealand’s Hikurangi Subduction Zone causing a magnitude 9 earthquake and extensive tsunami.

You may remember that I wrote on a similar theme last year, but by going backwards in time, to compare a Hikurangi event to the cataclysmic earthquake, tsunami and city firestorm of Lisbon’s 1755 disaster.

The Hikurangi Subduction Zone, which lies off the east coast of the North Island, poses a significant threat to North Island coastal cities and settlements. Experts say there’s a 1 in 4 chance of a very big earthquake, magnitude 8 or greater, occurring here in the next 50 years. What might happen is explained in this five minute video.

A magnitude 9 event would likely kill tens of thousands of people, mainly from tsunami, and would displace hundreds of thousands of people and cause building damage exceeding $100 billion, according to one scenario. That’s like combining the impacts of the Canterbury earthquakes and Covid-19 into one event.

It’s clearly something we need get organised for. Tsunami inundation maps have been published. Potential escape routes have been posted. Public advice has been disseminated. Though I can’t find any plans to protect or relocate critical facilities like hospitals.

Now, how to deal with the impacts after an event? This needs a proper understanding of the nature of the disaster beast, as an interconnected system.

Dhungara illustrates the “systems” view by tracing the complex after-effects of the imagined disaster. He starts on Day 2, by asking where people can live, as temporary accommodation fills and overflows, and friends and family are themselves affected and unable to help. Rental and commercial accommodation becomes scarce and highly priced, and people gradually leave the damaged region.

Transport routes are initially blocked, and food and industrial products cannot be delivered. Many employers cannot trade and face a cash flow crisis, or cannot operate now that staff are unavailable. Over time, incomes stop, payments default. Banks continue to expect mortgage repayments. The impacts cascade and grow.

Recall that in Japan’s tsunami disaster on March 11, 2011, the destruction of hospitals and deaths of hundreds of medical staff cascaded into delays and inability to treat thousands of injured people. The initial death toll was 15,000, and this grew to about 20,000 in the following weeks from disaster-related physical and psychological illnesses.

As a systems guru, Dhungana says that cascading failures in human systems occur “because every part of society depends on another. The earthquake is the trigger. The disaster emerges from the interactions.”

He says that capacities to manage and reduce stresses within the system are crucial. Warning services and emergency management capacities are only the start.

Other capacities – financial, institutional, organisational, informational – are soon needed to support the clean-up, repair, rebuild and social healing activities, and to prevent disaster stresses from inadvertently magnifying and cascading.

Dhungara writes: “the critical question is not whether our capacity exists for Day 1 … it is whether sufficient capacity remains on Day 100 of the disaster event.”

Or 1,000 days later, for that matter. The recovery process is long and expensive and needs conscious systems thinking and planning ahead of time.

The 2025 Government Cabinet paper on the recovery process, drawing on the Cyclone Gabrielle experience, extends to 26 pages of decision tools – just for Ministers’ recovery decision-making! While useful, of course, it was roundly criticised by ex-minister Lianne Dalziel, as failing to address the development of necessary capacities within communities, and likely to lead to costly mistakes.

Every shortcoming in the recovery process inevitably adds to the accumulated total impact of the disaster.

That’s not a natural hazard problem, it’s a systems failure problem.

On a more positive note, Dhungana points out that complex systems rarely remain static, and that adaptations gradually emerge, citing, as an example, the way governments and businesses have adjusted to the current Middle East oil supply crisis.

That’s a good lesson: we can shrink post-event losses by simply strengthening the robustness and adaptive capacities of disaster-related societal systems.

Dhungara points to standard systems tool-kit approaches: identifying dependencies and vulnerabilities; developing scenarios; exploring adaptation capabilities; and identifying small tweaks that can produce large gains in system function and robustness.

To these, I would add – once again – the overarching need for the Government to wake up and recognise its responsibility for the governance of disaster risk. And to systematically invest in behind-the-scenes systems thinking and in long-term risk reduction and resilience capacities.

Emergency management and recovery cheque-writing are good and necessary, but what about working harder beforehand – to make the disasters and the cheques much smaller?

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The aim of the campaign is to make people think about how we humans contribute to creating disasters out of natural hazards.

Subscribers may recognise that this is also one of my enduring themes.

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It’s what WE do that sets us up for a real disaster

Natural hazards are, well, natural, aren’t they. Part of nature, part of life.

But natural disaster?? Nah, not so! That’s because we can be smart and do a lot to avoid natural hazards and to manage their impacts.

By we, I mean all of us, as a society.

Sadly, in last week’s earthquake in Japan, at least 13 people died when a supermarket collapsed on them. But most supermarkets did not collapse.

Japan is very attentive to its natural hazards and to engineering better ways to live safely with them.

You can bet that an enquiry will find there was some construction error at that particular supermarket that led to the failure.

As they say, earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.

Which takes me to my favourite HEVI formula: Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impact.

The point of the UNDRR campaign is to move people beyond the common obsession with the hazards, and to get them thinking about the exposure and vulnerability components of the equation, the components that we as societies can do something about. Such as supermarket design, for example.

The campaign has high relevance to New Zealand as our authorities continue to remain fixated on natural hazards and resilience and don’t want to talk about disaster risk.

For the UNDRR, the major concern is the numerous, economically less developed countries that suffer repeatedly from disasters as a result of poverty, unsafe buildings, inadequate laws, and extensive exploitation and abuse of natural resources and environments.

This crisp 55 second video spells it out.

I also found a nice explanation by Kevin Blanchard on LinkedIn:

Framing disasters as natural “strips away the social, political, environmental, and economic dimensions that often play ‘the’ critical role in risk creation. It conceals the injustices that make communities vulnerable in the first place, suggesting disasters are unavoidable rather than influenced by choices, policies, and conditions rooted in inequity.”

In this respect, New Zealand is not immune. Think of the people who lived in the poorer, liquefaction-prone, eastern areas of Christchurch, who lost their houses in the 2011 earthquake.

And the remote, poor communities of Tairāwhiti in the North Island, still struggling with the devastation wrought by exploitative land use practices years after Cyclone Gabrielle struck.

So it’s definitely time to clean up our language, folks. Especially you @#$%& politicians. Oops.

Here are some other useful leads on this topic.

#NoNaturalDisasters hashtag#InclusiveDRR hashtag#EFDRR

UNDRR page outlining the issue.

Five reasons why disasters are not natural, from United Nations University.

Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters: The Economics of Effective Prevention, World Bank - United Nations study.

There’s even a game StopDisasters you can access!

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The leaky building disaster is very relevant to our other, more-common, disaster concerns, as it highlights New Zealand’s inadequate risk governance (i.e. our inadequate institutions and processes for governing nationally-important risks.)

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New Zealand’s self-inflicted, un-natural disaster

The news media reported that thousands of homes were badly damaged and people were struggling to cope. A terrible disaster had occurred, but no flood, fire, earthquake or other dramatic event was evident. No ambulances were to be seen, no sirens to be heard.

Yes, it was the leaky building disaster. The disaster that grows silently inside walls and rots them, slowly sneaking up on unsuspecting homeowners, destroying their prime asset from within.

First noticed around 1994, the problem was to become one of New Zealand’s most costly disasters, with a total bill of at least $50 billion, ranking with the Canterbury earthquakes and the Covid 19 pandemic.

We now know what happened.

Around 1990, building regulations were altered to allow the use of untreated, fungus-friendly pinus radiata timber for the framing of houses, despite the well-known fact that this timber rapidly rots if it gets wet.

About the same time, Mediterranean-look, sheet-cladding systems became very popular for house exteriors, but these were later found to be leak-prone, allowing water to reach the framing.

The result was extreme vulnerability to a very modest hazard – ordinary, day-to-day weather.

It’s the HEVI formula in action again (Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impact). The Hazard was minor, but the Exposure was large (thousands of houses) and the Vulnerability was extreme (virtually 100%.) The resulting Impact was mind-boggling.

Leaky homes are astonishingly expensive to fix – $300,000 per house is common. Well over 100,000 homes were affected. The disaster has sucked dry the savings and assets of tens of thousands of people across New Zealand.

And it is not over yet. The rotting behind the facades never stops. Beware if your walls get damp and mouldy; be afraid when the wallboards are stripped off.

Think of my friends in Roseneath, Wellington, whose house dampness repair costs ballooned to $700,000. Or others in Papanui, Christchurch, who hired a builder for a few repairs after the 2011 earthquake, only to discover rotting so bad their home had to be written off and demolished.

Then there’s St Lukes Garden Apartments in Auckland, a large apartment complex which in 2025 needed $240 million of repairs, equivalent to a heart-breaking $850,000 per apartment.

And it’s not just about homes: the same problem afflicts timber-framed schools and commercial buildings built in that era. In 2011, the Education Department estimated that school remediation costs could amount to $1.5 billion.

How did this immense failure come about? The 2002 Hunn Report on the Weathertightness of Buildings concluded that almost everyone had played a role – governments, building materials companies, local government building departments, developers and builders.

But no one was accountable it seemed. Bills had been paid and profits taken, but individual homeowners were left to rot.

In other disasters, like the Christchurch earthquakes, large chunks of the losses were covered by private insurance and Government support. Alas, no such relief for leaky home victims.

Insurance policies were no use as they generally don’t cover failure of workmanship or materials. The 2011 Government Financial Assistance Package was an abject failure, ultimately helping only a few percent of affected owners. Compensation claims via court action have met with only limited success.

If you want the details, read Peter Dyer’s 2019 book “Rottenomics, The Story of New Zealand’s Leaky Buildings Disaster”.

It was Dyer who estimated that around 174,000 dwellings were affected and that the total remediation cost for domestic housing would be $47 billion, based on data provided in various government reports. Adding the costs for public and commercial buildings suggests a total cost of at least $50 billion.

That’s a massive destruction of assets. It’s $50 billion of resources lost to the economy, resources that could have done wonders for developing new industries, improving New Zealand’s dismal productivity, or addressing our many social and environmental problems.

Dyer’s book pulls no punches. He argues that the root cause was the neo-conservative relaxation of standards and controls on building materials and building processes around 1990, including through the 1991 Building Act. In effect, it was failure of national risk governance.

He says there had been no problems with timber durability in previous decades, owing to the rigorous efforts of the Timber Preservation Authority. It was an excellent example of disaster risk reduction at work. But the Authority was abolished in 1987 as part of the “reforms”.

This is a shocking case of the “prevention paradox”: where the effectiveness of the Authority in containing a threat led to unawareness of the threat and subsequent neglect of the prevention policy. Bye, bye prevention, hello risk.

Could we unwittingly generate another self-inflicted disaster like this in future?

Quite possibly, since the fundamental cause was the systemic failure of technical and political competence within government, and there are few signs today that this lesson has been learned.

Witness the current Government’s single-minded focus on economic development, and its constant narratives of “cutting red tape” and shrinking “wasteful back-office staff”, in effect gutting the very capacities needed to deal with invisible risks, human complacency and an unpredictable future.

You see it in the three new bills currently before Parliament on Planning, Natural Environment, and Emergency Management. These are key areas of attention for managing disaster risk but the Bills do not even mention the words “disaster risk”!

That’s bizarre. If we don’t name it, how can we foresee it, manage it and control it?

Worse, an explicit goal of the Government is to weaken environmental protection in favour of development, as was pointedly criticised by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment last Monday, and to shift responsibility for environment costs and disaster risk onto under-resourced local government, something also criticised this week.

It’s a pretty scary recipe for a lot more costly disaster events in future.

I need to be frank – basically, our national risk governance is crap. That’s the root of the problem. Absent leadership, absent policy, absent funding.

The leaky building disaster was an almost unbelievable fiasco, but it’s just another demonstration of what happens when governments ignore their basic responsibilities for managing the nation’s risks.

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It’s good to think ahead, but my question is this – are we are giving sufficient attention, right now, to today’s infrastructure disaster risks?

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Infrastructure Commission sizes up current and future bills for flood damage

There are so many stories and images in the media these days of flood-busted bridges and roads – this month it was in Waihopai Valley, as shown above. Last month it was a similarly-damaged bridge on South Wairarapa’s Tūranganui River.

We’ve also had some bad years lately – in 2023, flood losses to physical infrastructure in the top half of the North Island cost an estimated $5 to $7.5 billion, according to the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission.

Climate change is a known accomplice in this worsening infrastructure damage and is expected to steadily increase the losses in future. How much of an increase was revealed in a new Commission report released last week, based on an analysis by Earth Sciences New Zealand.

The study found that the annual average loss (AAL) to infrastructure from inland and coastal flooding (but excluding landslides) could rise from today’s $465 million per annum to $790 million per annum by 2075. That’s a chunky, extra 70%.

It’s no wonder that cost-effective flood risk infrastructure is a priority for the next decade in New Zealand’s National Infrastructure Plan.

But let’s shift the magnifying glass from climate change and 2075, to focus on today’s infrastructure disaster risks, and to ask whether we are doing enough right now to shrink that current $465 million baseline?

Surprisingly, infrastructure is a relatively small part of New Zealand’s disaster risk portfolio – the $465 million figure is equal to about 10% of the average annual cost of disasters estimated by Treasury – but it has some characteristics that predisposes it to organised disaster risk reduction.

In particular, it’s a very concentrated form of asset; physically, in terms of location, design and cost; and socially, in terms of public utility, ownership and political attention.

These features provide the basis for the longstanding New Zealand Lifelines Council, an industry-government collaboration of major players that works to analyse and improve the resilience of the whole infrastructure system, through a wide range of joint activities.

Infrastructure also benefits from its very own Government think tank, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, established in 2019 to clean up the three decades of drift and short-term-ism on infrastructure planning and investment that followed the demise of the Ministry of Works and Development in 1988.

As part of its work, the Commission produces an impressive series of research insights, including a detailed 2025 report “Invest or Insure? Preparing infrastructure for natural hazard”.

This report identifies three basic approaches available to infrastructure owners for managing risk:

1. Invest in risk reduction;

2. Reduce fiscal risk through insurance or similar financial mechanisms;

3. Defer action and respond to damage if and when it occurs.

Of course, of the three options, only the first, risk reduction, addresses root causes and actually reduces risk and ongoing losses.

Furthermore, since the losses are ultimately borne by the nation as a whole, risk reduction is not simply an operational question for infrastructure owners, but a national priority for policy and action.

Much more effort is needed to unpack the risk reduction option and to identify high-return projects for investment.

Studies overseas have found that disaster risk reduction projects can be very cost effective, with benefit-to-cost ratios of 4 or higher. (Note for Minister Bishop: that’s heaps better than most of your proposed Roads of National Significance.)

Unfortunately, risk reduction is often handicapped by inadequate language and conceptual frameworks.

Consider the Infrastructure Commission’s statement that “the 2023 North Island weather events caused an estimated $5 to $7.5 billion in physical infrastructure damage.”

Observe how this language points the finger at the Hazard, but not at any deficiencies in the Exposure or the Vulnerability of the infrastructure? (Recall the HEVI formula, Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impact)

There’s also the unspoken assumption that the assets we build have the prior right to exist, and if there’s a problem, it’s the weather that’s at fault – irrespective of how dumbly we locate and design the assets.

We need to turn that around, and recognise that nature has the upper hand. We can’t do much about the weather, but we can be clever about the exposure and vulnerability of our assets.

A deeper problem is the general lack of awareness of how, as a society, we create risk, through what and where we build, and through how we treat the natural environment.

Unless we are clear-eyed on how disaster risk is created, we will continue to inadvertently build and grow it. That means billions of dollars’ worth of risk will lie in wait, ready for release in the form of death, injury and economic loss, whenever an extreme natural hazard comes by.

To some extent, we can be thankful that climate change is forcing us to think harder about the true nature of disaster risk and the billions of dollars we already lose to disasters.

We also can be thankful for the leadership on disaster risk reduction shown by the Infrastructure Commission and the Lifelines Council. Both are models for other sectors.

Nevertheless, more generally, across all sectors, there has been heavy criticism of the ad hoc, fragmented nature of New Zealand’s risk management.

It’s clear we need some sort of national oversight body, such as a Disaster Risk Commission, to oversee and drive risk reduction efforts across all sectors.

An upgrade of our disaster risk governance such as this is long overdue. Without it, we will carry on, year after year, needlessly bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of disasters.

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South Pacific islands prepare once again for El Niño

Pacific island countries are particularly vulnerable to weather extremes, and managing disaster risk is an ever-present need. Right now, with the 2026-2027 El Niño on its way, that need is urgent.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) Prime Minister James Marape has already directed his country to prepare for the possibility of an extraordinary and prolonged dry season, and for food shortages. “This is a time for preparedness, not panic” he says.

What each island group will face this year and next – drought, storm, cyclone – depends acutely on where in the awesomely vast Pacific Ocean it is located, and on the season.

Climate change is also a factor – while it does not cause El Niños, it does amplify the extreme weather events that El Niños bring – particularly drought and heavy rainfall.

From now to October, it’s the dry season, when droughts are more likely. Thereafter, from November to about April, it’s the wet season, when the tropical cyclones show up.

Unlike dramatic storms and floods, drought is slow moving, insidious, and multi-tentacled, affecting water resources, soils, crops, food availability, drinking water, nutrition, infectious diseases, ecosystems, and wildfire risk.

Drought can continue for well over a year, and can deeply impact the economy.

For example, in the big 1997-1998 El Niño, Fiji had to call for help from the UN to deal with a prolonged drought. About 50,000 households were receiving emergency water supplies. The production of sugar, Fiji’s main export crop, dropped by 25% in 1997, to 354,000 tonnes, and then further again in 1998, to only 259,000 tonnes.

Preparedness for drought includes practical steps such as:

· Conserving and rationing public water resources.

· Maintaining and upgrading drinking-water wells and cisterns.

· Protecting dwindling water sources from animal pollution.

· Planting drought-resistant crops and protecting topsoil from water loss and wind loss.

· Organising alternative food supplies.

· Selling livestock while still in good condition.

· Boosting fire prevention activities and capabilities.

· Providing income support where essential.

Potentially, a country’s national adaptation plan might be tapped for ideas as well, since these plans already have initiatives such as nature-based ecosystem resilience projects and insurance-based financial resilience projects to deal with climate extremes.

Financial capacities are a critical factor for coping with drought. Household savings, borrowing or overseas family remittances will be lifelines for many, while governments will need to access existing reserve funds, special bank drawing rights and other borrowing.

Why is drought common in El Niños? It’s because the average rainfall pattern (see the map above) moves eastward toward the central Pacific.

Ordinarily, PNG and most of the South Pacific islands lie under the broad diagonal rainy band at the left. But in an El Niño, the band heads east, leaving the islands in sunshine and eventually drought.

Conversely, some of the normally-dry islands in the east, in the big blue triangle, become unusually wet.

Nowadays, climate models are used to forecast rainfall and water stress across the islands a few months ahead, as is shown in the map below. The map’s message is clear: most South Pacific islands can expect the next three months to be very dry.

The second big weather concern for the Pacific Islands is tropical cyclones. On average, nine tropical cyclones occur during the South Pacific wet season, starting around November, mostly in the west, from Vanuatu and New Caledonia across to Tonga. A few may become viciously destructive.

But in El Niño years, the cyclones tend to occur further east, toward the region from Tonga across to the Cook Islands and French Polynesia, and there are usually more of them. As a result, cyclone numbers might triple in the east but halve in the west.

These past long-term patterns allow scientists to provide statistical outlooks for cyclone risk for the different island groups, at the beginning of each cyclone season.

While droughts and cyclones are the major concerns, there are also some possible pluses, according to SPREP, the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme, such as: the recharging of atoll freshwater lenses in normally-dry islands in Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu; the possibility of increased tuna catches in Kiribati waters; and the advantages of dry weather for construction, renewable energy and tourism.

Now, in summary, is this year’s El Niño event an existential threat or simply business as usual?

On the one hand, El Niño is a natural phenomenon and has occurred many times before. It interacts with climate change, but unlike climate change, it’s not an existential threat.

On the other, it is certainly not business as usual this year and next, as many Pacific island communities and countries are at risk of weeks of drought and some will face a higher risk of tropical cyclones.

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Could it be our turn in a few months’ time, during summer, when the emerging El Niño joins forces with relentless climate change?

Excessive summer heat is bad for people and most everything else. Here are some basic details. Knowing these can help you avoid the bad stuff. Possibly even death.

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Heatwaves are not just about beaches and ice cream: people wilt and die.

Over the last four years, 200,000 people have died of heat stress in Europe, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the deaths were preventable. Of all Europe’s natural hazards, extreme heat is the deadliest, the silent killer.

This year, temperature records are shattering across the continent, breaking through 40°C in many inland places. The death toll so far is at least 3,700 according to news reports and is certain to rise much higher. Climate change is the main culprit.

Heatwave disasters are not new — in Europe’s 2003 summer, an estimated 70,000 people died across Europe. In Paris, most victims were less-mobile, elderly people living by themselves without the benefit of regular care services.

It’s the combination of high temperature and humidity that bowls us over. It’s when we struggle to evaporate enough moisture from our skin to keep our body’s internal temperature at safe levels*.

When the summer sun beats down on concrete and tarmac, cities just get hotter and hotter, storing up heat, and easily becoming 5°C or more hotter than adjacent rural land.

A week ago, in London during the middle of the UK Red Alert, Greenpeace measured footpath temperatures as high as 57°C. Ironically, the fearsome heat caused the cancellation of a long-planned climate conference in the city on 24 June - on managing extreme heat!

Conditions like these are a mortal threat not just to the elderly, but also to anyone who is ill, badly housed, or living in poverty, and anyone working outdoors. Air-conditioning is not common in European homes. In the past, houses have cooled down naturally overnight, but in recent heatwaves, the nights have offered little relief.

Across the Atlantic, half the US is now facing a heatwave. Extreme heat is also the deadliest weather hazard in the United States, far exceeding fatalities from flooding, hurricanes or tornadoes.

Despite its relatively cool, oceanic climate, New Zealand is likely to join the summer heatwave club in a few months, owing to the impending 2026-2027 super El Niño. As I said in last week’s post, heatwaves will be among a variety of significant ecological and economic impacts from this event.

It’s a double whammy: El Niño temperature extremes will sit on top of the already-hiked temperatures from climate change, and at the same time, the physics of climate change will worsen whatever temperature extremes El Niño creates.

Temperatures over 40°C have occurred here in the past. The small town of Rangiora, in Canterbury, holds the national record for the highest measured temperature, at 42.4°C, measured on 7 February, 1973. The heatwave extended over most of Canterbury and Marlborough provinces. It was right in the middle of the 1972-1973 El Niño.

It was too hot for school and work, and many people were sent home. Fire services were kept busy with numerous fires, and there were reports of the loss of 26,000 chickens at poultry farms.

Scientific information on heatwaves and their health impacts in New Zealand is surprisingly scarce. One study for Canterbury estimated that excess deaths during the 2017-2018 summer heatwaves were as much as 20% of the baseline mortality, or 24 extra deaths. That’s a third of the WHO European numbers on a pro rata basis, but it’s still a significant toll.

Better answers to heatwave questions should emerge from the Ministry of Health’s current Health National Adaptation Plan, which aims to produce New Zealand-specific heatwave definitions and a national surveillance system for excess summer mortality.

The Plan has already helped develop Metservice’s national Heat Alert system, which provides warnings for 46 different cities and towns over the summer months, and it’s pursuing an assessment of urban health-related improvements such as tree coverage and access to green/blue spaces.

While Canterbury may be tops in the temperature stakes, it’s the sub-tropical north of the country that wins the prize for stressful humid conditions*, and Auckland’s CBD can get dangerously hot.

Certainly, if I was Auckland’s Chief Medical Officer, I’d have heatwaves firmly on my radar this summer.

And if I were Auckland’s Mayor, I’d be asking what the city should be doing to reduce high urban heat.

It’s fairly obvious what to do on heat-stress prevention. Keep in mind the HEVI formula: Hazard x Exposure x Vulnerability = Impact. Aim to reduce the heat hazard, the exposure of people to heat, and the vulnerability of at-risk groups. Typical interventions include:

• Public information campaigns, to push messages on avoiding dehydration and heatstroke, and not working outdoors or in very hot workplaces;

• Wide dissemination of heatwave early warnings;

• Preparedness regimes for elder care homes and medical and paramedical services;

• Respite access to air-conditioned public buildings;

• Volunteer networks to check on elderly and vulnerable people and to provide water, electrolyte drinks and other help.

Will we cope with this coming summer and the El Niño? Are the authorities preparing? Can the paramedics deliver? Will the chickens survive?

We do have the MetService Heat Alert system, and there’s plenty of public advice for managing heat, provided by Te Whatu Ora (Health NZ), the National Emergency Management Agency’s subsidiary brand Get Ready, and some local authorities. The Ministry of Health has heatwaves firmly in its sights. It’s a type of disaster risk we can readily manage.

But climate physics is relentless. Debilitating heatwaves will increasingly affect New Zealand in future.

Meanwhile, we are doing the homework and are getting prepared. Hopefully, as a result, fewer people will die each summer.

The chickens? I really don’t know.

* Postscript: A good account of how humidity in New Zealand is critical to heat stress can be found in this article.

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What does this mean for New Zealand? Potentially a lot. Here I’ll squeeze some insights from the big 1997-1998 event, based on a 28-page report I assembled for the Ministry of Research Science and Technology at the time.

Now it’s 2026. Will the government get organised to face this potential disaster, or will it be the usual, ad hoc, reactive, too-late approach?

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Family drama: La Niña’s left home but bro El Niño has returned and plans to stay a while.

It’s a marriage of the globe’s atmosphere and oceans, for better or worse. The offspring, Niña and Niño, come and go. The household is in turmoil; La Niña has just left the nest and El Niño is coming back, probably for a year or so.

Official predictions are in hand. Countries around the Pacific Ocean are concerned, on guard, preparing. Economies and people will likely suffer, as normal climate patterns begin to shuffle away from what everyone is used to.

For some regions, it will mean heavier rainfall and flooding, or more tropical cyclones. For others it will be droughts, food and water shortages, heatwaves and scary wildfires.

We know that an El Niño is coming because its classic signature has shown up in the eastern Pacific Ocean: that tongue of abnormal sea temperatures along the Equator.

Some experts are saying it may become a “super El Niño”, putting it up there in rank with the 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 events.

The El Niño is not caused by climate change. The World Meteorological Organization is clear on this in its El Niño briefing, but beware the glass shard in the honey: they say that climate change will amplify the extreme weather events that El Niño will bring, such as heatwaves or heavy rainfall. So hot will be hotter and wet will be wetter because of climate change.

For more on El Niño basics, check out these pages: Wikipedia and ESNZ.

How do El Niño events affect New Zealand?

New Zealand is a bystander to the main arenas of action in the tropics, but it has been strongly affected in past El Niño events and almost certainly will be affected again this time.

Note that I say almost certainly. This is because, like any child, each El Niño has its own personality. Some events can be short and sharp, others are drawn out over more than a year. Some don’t closely follow the average pattern, and some are fizzers.

Roughly speaking, an El Niño means more westerlies and southerlies, and fewer northerlies. That means wetter and cloudier in the west and south, sunnier and dryer in the east and the north. Somewhat cooler in the south.

What can the big El Niño of 1997-1998 tell us?

In the thick of this earlier El Niño, in April 1998, I assembled a detailed report* on the event and its impacts for the Ministry of Research Science and Technology, based on information and advice from different sources and sectors.

The impacts were diverse, both good and bad. The biggest problem was low rainfall and drought in east coast regions of both islands, which stressed natural vegetation and farm production.

· Hardest hit were land-based industries – agriculture and horticulture particularly – but also water resources and ecological systems.

· Dairy production was down 7% on the previous 1996-97 year.

· Grain production was down about 25%, and there were quality issue with barley.

· The effects on horticulture varied widely: apple production was particularly badly hit, but some other fruit crops, including grapes, were little affected.

· Vegetable prices rose and contributed to a rise in the Consumer Price Index.

· Irrigated farming – for dairying, grains and grapes – was least affected.

· Forestry saw significant die-back and poor wood growth, but luckily there were few problems with windthrow and wildfire.

· Ecosystems suffered wilting and heavy dieback in many eastern areas, and there were some complex stresses with multi-year impacts.

· Water resources in eastern areas of both islands were hard hit and access had to be restricted. However, the big Canterbury aquifers fed by rain spillover in the Southern Alps retained their storage despite significant draw-off for irrigation.

· Hydroelectricity production and lake storage benefited greatly from the higher rainfalls along the Southern Alps.

· Record temperatures and higher demand for air conditioning precipitated a five-week outage of the main electricity cables supplying Auckland’s CBD.

· The total cost to farm-gate returns from the impacts on agriculture, dairying and horticulture were assessed by Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) staff at $425 million; equal to about 0.6% of GDP at the time.

· MAF also noted that, since downstream valued-added agricultural production was worth about three times the on-farm returns, the total national cost would be more than $1.2 billion or about 1.8 % of GDP.

One area the report didn’t cover was the impact on New Zealand’s overseas competitors and on global prices for primary produce – these would have had an important influence on the net economic impact.

The wrap-up: prospects for 2026-2027 El Niño and action on risks

This El Niño is highly likely to be a significant event for New Zealand. Previous events like the 1997-1998 event are not blueprints but they provide powerful guides to the type and scale of threats that we face.

Much has changed since 1998, such as the enormous growth of irrigated dairying in Canterbury and Southland, greater use of on-farm technology, better seasonal climate forecasts, and improved capabilities of primary industries to manage variability in both climate and global markets.

Nevertheless, the 2026-2027 period is likely to be gruelling for thousands of farmers and horticulturists in eastern regions, and climate change will make any heatwaves even more unbearable. New Zealand highest-ever temperature, 42.4 °C was recorded at Rangiora during the 1972-1973 El Niño. The current European heatwave shows what that would be like.

Flooding in Westland and Southland is something to look out for. But on the plus side, there should be some welcome relief to folks up north who have suffered so much rain and flooding in recent years.

It’s the possibility of a direct multi-billion dollar kicker to the economy that should motivate serious Government concern and action right now.

I suggest that a national mechanism should be convened, say under the leadership of the Ministry of Primary Industries, to stimulate and coordinate the assessment of risks and the organising of response action, across all of the relevant sectors.

The process would need to actively engage industries, experts and the public. The 2020 Covid disaster response shows how effective such an open, nation-wide approach can be. It’s also a perfect opportunity to put Treasury’s recent advice on managing economic shocks to the test.

This is the moment when the New Zealand Government can show real leadership and shake off its usual uncoordinated, post-hoc management of disaster risk.

* Basher, R. E., 1998. The 1997/98 El Nino Event: Impacts, Responses and Outlook for New Zealand. Report No. 73, Ministry of Research Science and Technology, New Zealand Government, 28p.

The report is now available on ESNZ’s El Niño impacts page. NOTE, currently the ESNZ site requires the full code for ñ – n%CC%83 – in the report’s link. If you copy the address in your browser, make sure it uses n%CC%83, not ñ.

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I’m inspired by a fascinating piece by Tina Law in The Post on 27 May. It was one of a recent series on floods and housing in Stuff newspapers under the banner “Treading Water”.

The series was mostly about the pain and dilemmas of flood-affected homeowners in Christchurch, but Tina’s article highlighted the city’s progress on rejigging its streams and drainage infrastructure to reduce future floods.

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Success! More rain but less flooding!

Christchurch is dead flat, isn’t it? Well, apart from the parts that creep up the Port Hills. It certainly looks dead flat to visitors, especially anyone from a hilly city like Wellington, or even undulating Auckland.

So, when it rains, where does the water go?

Ah, yes, down the well-known Ōtākaro/Avon and Ōpāwaho/Heathcote Rivers, which empty into their common estuary east of the city. Since they are flowing, they must be running downhill, which means the city cannot be totally flat.

In fact, if you look at a topographical map of Christchurch, you will see a surprising number of little meandering blue lines, slim waterways such as Dudley Creek, Waimairi Stream, Wairarapa Stream, Okeover Stream, Ilam Stream, Paparua Stream, Nottingham Stream, and others un-named or disappearing into subterranean tunnels and pipes.

These subtle depressions of the landscape are barely recognised even by long-term residents, but they are crucial to what happens when it rains. Then all of them will flow, at the imperious command of gravity, heading slowly along to lower levels. In heavy rain, that may mean rising above their normal banks and taking paths through adjacent neighbourhoods.

Unsurprisingly, Christchurch is no stranger to flooding. As they say, what do you expect if you build a city on a swamp?

Various flood mitigation schemes have been proposed over the years, including storage ponds, stream bed improvements, bypass channels like the Woolston Cut, and even the raising of houses.

But the latest, really exciting idea is to “spongify” the city – to make the land more absorbent through use of green spaces, wetlands, and storage ponds to counteract impermeable urban paving. “Spongification” also results in reduced soil runoff, and improvements in water quality, ecosystem function and public amenity.

Over recent decades two new factors have made Christchurch’s flood problems much worse.

The first is the astonishing changes wrought by the 2010-2011 earthquakes, which shook and flung the land about with such force, that some areas were raised, and others lowered, by as much as half a metre, putting long-established drainage and stream-flow patterns into disarray.

Water that used to move by long habit, now hung around, pooling in newly-created depressions, or flowing only reluctantly downstream, impeded by newly-slack gradients or collapsed stream banks.

After the earthquakes, streets and houses that had never experienced flooding, or only rarely, began to experience them frequently. Significant flooding occurred in 2014, 2017, 2022, 2025 and 2026. As Tina Law said in her article, many residents came to dread the rain.

The second factor is the increase in extreme rainfalls from climate change. One study found that the rainfall that caused flooding to Canterbury in May 2021 was 10% to 15% more intense because of climate change.

Christchurch is tackling these two factors head on, through a combination of citizen engagement, political organisation, financial commitment, and engineering expertise. Among other things, the City Council has:

· Created several “retention” ponds, such as the Wigram Basin, large areas of land that can temporarily store big volumes of water (nearly 2 million cubic metres in total.) A bit like shock absorbers, the ponds rapidly fill up with water during storms, and then release the excess water to streams after the event is over, thereby avoiding damaging peak flows and flooding.

· Dredged the bottoms of rivers where uplift was impeding the flows, and widened collapsed banks and other narrowed strips to allow freer flows.

· Built embankments along some streams, and repaired and improved small-scale drainage infrastructure such as pipes, culverts, and open drains, to avoid local flooding problems.

· Bought and demolished or relocated the 28 houses that were most flood-prone alongside the Ōpāwaho/Heathcote River and Dudley Creek.

According to Tina’s sources, the storage scheme has operated successfully in six big storms since 2019, and residents report there’s less flooding these days.

All credit to the massive background of knowledge and effort involved – legal/administrative, hydrological engineering, and ecological – as can be seen by a look at the City Council’s Flood Management Framework and Waterways. Wetlands and Drainage Guide, and the many resources listed by the community organisation Ōpāwaho/Heathcote River Network.

However, there remains the gnarly question of how to fund flood protection in future. Especially since it’s also needed for adapting to global climate change.

Almost all of the $300 million that the City has already spent on flood works since the 2010-2011 earthquakes has come from its own resources.

On the one hand, that $300 million amounts to barely 0.2% of the total value of residential property in the city, and it’s well-justified by its benefit to cost ratio.

But on the other hand, it’s a big ask for a city to raise sums like these and service the debt from its rates (property land tax) income. And there’s still another $350 million to be found for planned works over the next ten years.

Oddly, the Government’s Regional Infrastructure Fund has supported flood protection works in wider Canterbury, but not in Christchurch City. That’s because Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are specifically excluded from eligibility to this fund.

Christchurch is not unique in its flooding problems: many cities and towns are struggling to deal with increasing disaster risks and climate change.

Rehette Stoltz, President of Local Government New Zealand, and also Gisborne’s Mayor, says this task is too big for local governments to handle on their own and has called on central government to stop procrastinating on how climate adaptation will be funded.

Sadly, she may be waiting a while, given the climate change denialism among some members of the Coalition Government and its decidedly flat and spongy approach to our growing disaster risk problems.

But let’s be positive today and celebrate what Christchurch has ably shown at local level – real action based on citizen engagement, political commitment, and science and engineering expertise.

That’s the model the Government should be applying at national level.

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