The projects were led by Dr Judy Lawrence, Senior Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington’s Climate Change Research Institute, and involved researchers from NIWA, Infometrics and Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.
The first project was a Resilience National Science Challenge project working alongside three Hawkes Bay councils, iwi, and community panels to help formulate a coastal hazards strategy to manage the long-term impacts of climate change out to 2120.
The researchers examined the application of an analysis tool called Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning and Real Options, alongside more traditional assessment tools in the joint councils’ decision-making process. Dr Lawrence says this approach helps to shift community decision-making towards adaptation options that enable flexibility depending how the future evolves at the coast and helps account for the dynamic and uncertain aspects of climate change impacts.
Accounting for changing risk profiles over time is one of the biggest challenges in formulating adaptation to climate change, she says.
“We know the sea is rising and have a good estimate of sea-level rise up to 2050, but after that point we are much less certain about the exact timing of the changes, including polar ice sheet responses and how fast the world will reduce its carbon emissions. This uncertainty means decisions about settlements near the sea need to be flexible and made with precaution,” Dr Lawrence says.
“Moving away from thinking we can stop the sea by using hard structures is a first step–this method has limits, including affordability. Transitional changes to transform our coastal communities need to start now, but they require lead time to implement.”
This research approach is a first for coastal management and has been embedded in the 2017 Ministry for the Environment’s revised Coastal Hazards and Climate Change Guidance for local government.
The second project is part of the Deep South Challenge and was undertaken by Dr Lawrence, along with researchers NIWA and Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research. The focus was on urban systems, infrastructure, insurance and banking sectors, and governance systems and the flow-on effects of primary climate change impacts such as flooding, sea level rise and drought to these sectors and systems.
“We need to get better at understanding the dependencies and feedback loops between different systems of concern so that we can ‘stress-test’ our risk assumptions about the future,” Dr Lawrence says.
The research used the CIrcle tool developed by the Deltares research institute in the Netherlands to better understand the consequences of critical infrastructure failure. The researchers also applied systems thinking to identify critical dependencies between urban systems, infrastructure, financial services, and government systems, and ran workshops with key people working in each of these areas. They then looked at how their findings could be successfully communicated to decision makers and communities.
“We need deliberative processes that help us deepen our understanding of how systems are stressed by climate change,” Dr Lawrence says. “If we keep responding only to single impacts and ignoring the cumulative stress and the costs of multiple impacts, our adaptation choices will simply be insufficient. Improving our literacy in how climate change impacts compound and cascade will support more successful adaptation.”
The other researchers involved in these projects were Dr Rob Bell and Paula Blackett from NIWA, Dr Adolf Stroombergen from Infometrics, and Nick Cradock-Henry from Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.