Stephen Douglass.
OPINION:
Auckland has hard decisions to make about resiliency, says Stephen Douglass.
The Future Communities lead at GHD says that, until now, New Zealand’s climate change thinking has focused on decarbonisation while missing much of the resiliency question.
That has left us unprepared.
“Everyone was taken by surprise at the intensity of the flooding in Auckland this year,” says Douglass. “That surprise could be seen in the initial responses of the emergency teams and the mayor’s office to the first flooding.
“They’ve admitted they could have done things differently; they didn’t understand the intensity of the event. It was unprecedented.”
The floods exposed the vulnerability of the city to extreme natural events. It also underlined our lack of readiness to respond to a large-scale event.
To make matters worse, the damage didn’t stop at a single flood.
Douglass says this has been the experience elsewhere in the world. Severe weather often doubles up or, in the case of Auckland, there is a series of events over a short period of time: “Normally you get a chance for the system to equalise out again. Then you are ready for the next one. But when they double up or arrive back-to-back, the capacity for the natural systems and the infrastructure to recover is stretched and in some cases they ultimately fail.”
One of the hardest aspects of planning for resiliency is that it needs a highly localised approach. There are few nationwide or citywide solutions. What is needed in one valley will differ from what is needed in the next.
Douglass says: “The people who live in Swanson and Ranui will have a view of what resilience means to them that will be quite different to people who were not impacted when those areas were flooded”.
“Having a better understanding of what resilience means for people on the ground is important. Then once you get there, you need to have another discussion because, as a society, we can’t afford to do everything for everyone to ensure their property and the local infrastructure is protected for all events. There are some hard decisions to make.
“We’re not going to make the hardest decisions yet. We’re still in recovery mode. There is clearing up to do.
“Yet even as we respond to the recent floods there’s a need for some immediate interim decisions. Do we need to pull back from some areas? Should the government step in and buy the land?”
This discussion has already started in the valley around Swanson and Ranui. In a sense, earlier decisions about housing developments in that area have come home to roost. It turns out houses were built in what we now know are flood flow channels.
Douglass says: “It’s part of a big catchment that funnels water down into a small discharge area.
“The problem is the housing was already established there and there have been new developments with hard stand areas further up the catchment which contributed to the run-off increasing the risk and vulnerability of the existing houses.”
The option to retreat from areas like this is now on the table, but Douglass says there has to be a fair and equitable solution.
We have a precedent for making a decision to buy private residences giving people money to buy elsewhere, we did something similar in Christchurch after the earthquake.
“If we don’t get our ducks in a row, we’ll be having the same conversations again in the very near future when the next event comes through and hits in a slightly different catchment.”
There’s a danger we simply fall into a cycle of reacting to events.
Over time we may learn better ways of responding to events and planning our responses, but we’ve a long way to go towards adapting to and planning for the new normal.
Another issue is that solving environmental problems in one department can cause problems in another. To reduce emissions and promote sustainability, there has been a move to promote and enable the intensification of Auckland’s suburban housing.
Douglass says in effect this meant the old planning rules have come off and development can now happen almost anywhere across the city. When you get intensification, you getmore hard stand.
Stormwater that might have been absorbed by grass and plants now runs directly into stormwater drains and in turn is discharged into local creeks.
“Because the infill housing is not well-planned - it’s effectively sporadic and ad hoc - it leaves the council with a hard job deciding where to prioritise, where to upgrade systems to provide for the increase in run-off. We’re going to see more of that as intensification continues to be the focus.”
Our previous low-density urban environment was operating as intended and, in terms of resiliency to water, has been working successfully for more than 50 years.
As we’ve moved to denser urban living, we are creating more stormwater runoff into systems that are not able to cater for the extra load.
Douglass says we are retrofitting solutions into existing water networks that are a combination of pipe to natural and that creates issues. Where there is an ability to have a well-thought-out and planned greenfield development with a well-designed stormwater retention system that helps detain and bleed off the water over time, the system works very well.
Urban planning, development, climate risk and green spaces all form part of the big flood resiliency picture. Douglass talks in terms of integrated planning that looks beyond infrastructure items such as pumps and pipes into blue-green solutions such as using wetlands as sponges.
This approach brings other benefits such as biodiversity and more green spaces for people to access.
“We need to ensure these types of systems are healthy and can thrive. Take mangroves, they have a big benefit in terms of filtering out the sediment as it runs off our urban areas.”
Natural systems, like mangroves, need to be valued for the benefits they bring beyond just being there. They play an important function.
“There are some real opportunities in that space naturalising streams, not only from a maintenance perspective, but also as a habitat or biodiversity improvement and then there are the wellbeing effects of people having access,” he says.
For Douglass, the key is to learn, not just from the lessons of the recent floods, but the lessons of the past 20 to 30 years.
“We’re seeing flooding and other hazards impacting our communities but there’s a danger we’ll get to a comfort level where we think other people can sort the problem for us. They won’t.
“I’m optimistic we will get there. We will learn the lessons and focus on working with our communities to build better infrastructure, not only for now but for the kids and for future generations.
“That way we won’t have to keep going through this process. It’s not going to be done and dusted in two or three years. It’s not a political cycle solution. We’re looking at long-term generational change.”
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