Then he delivers the knockout blow.
“It’s not just climate change that is causing this problem. We have engineered or contributed to these disasters.
“We have taken the wetlands, or sponges, out of our landscape.”
Over the course of his 10-minute slot, Kay lists a series of devastating floods Aotearoa has experienced in the past five years — the sort that people refer to as once-in-a-generation events.
Edgecumbe in 2017 was followed by Canterbury which was followed by the West Coast which was followed by Nelson which was followed by Auckland, and on it goes.
Kay’s message is timely — it’s been just under 50 days since Cyclone Gabrielle made landfall, wreaking havoc on the East Coast, and beyond.
The impact of this cyclone (the fifth in just two years), has drawn endless comparisons with 1988’s Bola, which is widely regarded as the worst in New Zealand’s recorded history.
While rainfall levels didn’t reach that of Bola’s 900mm in 72 hours, this time around there was another factor at play —
forestry slash.
Debris and whole logs from the East Coast’s burgeoning industry filled waterways, taking on the role of bulldozers in the roaring waters of local rivers.
Kay’s presentation rolls on, and a paper that’s just celebrated its 35th birthday flashes up on the screen: Inquiry Into Flood Mitigation Measures Following Cyclone Bola, dated December 1988.
The report portended danger, speaking of how the draining of wetlands — which act as buffer zones, or sponges — intensified flooding in that historic storm.
Managing the unmanageable
“A possible effect of climate change is that cyclones of some form could pass close to New Zealand with increasing frequency. It may be that, in retrospect, the Bola storm will not be regarded as such an extreme event.”
Were those concerns, penned in 1988, heeded?
“We haven’t learnt much,” Kay tells Local Democracy Reporting.
“We might have learnt one thing, which is to plant trees, but we planted pines which wasn’t a good idea in retrospect.”
Kay has a way of making the seemingly mundane come to life as he describes the important role wetlands play in maintaining a healthy and balanced ecosystem.
Home to many of New Zealand’s endangered species, they are the fabric which bind much of New Zealand’s natural environment together.
They are like vital organs that filter water, he says.
Meanwhile, the country’s preoccupation with draining them has likely played a significant factor in the ongoing struggle against flood mitigation.
About 90 percent of the country’s wetlands have been drained — often for development — and the results have been devastating, he says.
“Wetlands are like sponges in the landscape. They basically absorb water when we have heavy rain and then they slowly let that water out when we have drought conditions.
“We’ve tended to drain them in the past because we have this colonial perspective that wetlands are wastelands. We treat them as swamps.”
Kay says that when Pākehā came to the country, many turned wetlands into pasture for livestock farming.
It wasn’t until 2020 that the government tightened up those rules, but even now, protection isn’t guaranteed, he says.
“It’s like the Cyclone Bola report says — we’ve taken away our wetlands, and we’ve therefore taken away the buffer zones for extreme weather events.
“You’ve got these huge natural water storage systems that we should be restoring, that we have naturally in the landscape … but instead we think ‘we need to build a dam in this valley (for
drinking water)’.”
With so many of the country’s wetlands now converted into farmland and urban areas, Kay says Aotearoa has lost its intergenerational knowledge of places that “used to flood a lot”.
Whole suburbs have been built on reclaimed land, so flooding issues tend to go a lot deeper than the usual explanations of councils failing to clear drains, he said.
No management system is safe when Kay is in the vicinity — he now takes aim at the historical approach of flood management in New Zealand, which is to straighten rivers and line them with stopbanks.
That technique, which is often aimed at trying to get water out to the coast as fast as possible, has proven disastrous for wildlife and humans alike.
Swimming holes and pools, which act as natural habitats for many fish species, have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, stopbanks — which aim to direct the flow and protect communities — elevate water levels above the floodplain.
When those stopbanks ultimately fail, the water is realeased with such a massive energy that the mitigation efforts often prove to be more of a risk than a safety net.
“We tend to think of those stopbanks as protecting everyone, but they have exceedance thresholds, and floods that are bigger than those stopbanks will over-top them.
“They have the potential to blow out because the loading behind the stopbanks is enormous.
“We’ve tried to manage what is essentially unmanageable.”
All of this, coupled with deforestation causing more water to flow off hillsides, has created the perfect storm.
Rivers need more space than people are often willing to give them, Kay says, and the results have been disastrous for communities built too close to them.
When it comes to finding solutions, he has a hard word for councils: stop treating the environment as a “nice-to-have”.
While infrastructure, roading and communications are important, those projects can’t come at the expense of looking after the natural world, something which we all rely on.
Stronger rules protecting wetlands need to not only be introduced, but also enforced, and restoration remains critical.
Kay also believes councils need to have more honest conversations with their communities about flood levels, and not shy away from explaining the risks of living in certain areas.
“The environment is critical, and we need to put that first, otherwise we’ve got nothing.”
Environmentalist Tom Kay is on a mission to get people rethinking how to protect natural and built environments. But sometimes that includes difficult truths, like realising the devastating flow-on effects of man-made “solutions”. He talks to Matthew Rosenberg .
