Flooding a sign of things to come - we must act

Martin Williams says as things stand, we are increasingly vulnerable to the risk of more flooding events. Photo / Warren Buckland

When my daughter asked me how I was in her usual cheery way early last Monday evening, I confessed to feeling a degree of "weather anxiety". This wasn't just rain. I sensed a serious problem.

My anxiety wasn't misplaced. Later in the evening we took in my brother-in-law, his wife and her mother.

The back wall of their house had stoved in as the retaining wall and bank behind it collapsed into the building. Now the house is condemned with a red sticker. Just over a month ago my brother-in-law's sister lost her house in Ōhau, after a fire swept through the village at the end of winter, and after a week of snowfall.

The blight of the Covid-19 pandemic overlays a deeper, more serious and enduring threat. In standing for the Regional Council, climate change was a primary concern for me.

A recent survey of our region confirms a mandate for the council to act. We are united around the council table that responding to climate change is our overriding objective. In one way or another, it permeates everything we do, with every policy, every ratepayer dollar directed to that cause.

We have been working hard on priorities for our next Long-Term Plan, which will be released for consultation in 2021. We are looking at significant investments to adapt to climate change, such as working with farmers to reforest less productive, marginal and erosion-prone hill slopes under the Right Tree Right Place initiative.

About 252,000 hectares of our hill country is prone to erosion (identified using our technology modelling, called SedNet).

Again, my fear last Monday evening was a repeat of the 2011 weather bomb that so massively scarred the landscapes of northern and southern Hawke's Bay, in the knowledge that sediment is the unrivalled "super stressor" to our stream, river and marine environments. As things stand, we are increasingly vulnerable to the risk of repeat events of that kind and severity.

We are also squarely focused on water security. First, this means promoting best practice land management, use efficiency and conservation approaches to minimise water demand, in both the rural and urban environments. But however far this can take us, I believe investments in community scale water storage will be essential to meet the inevitable supply deficit that this region will face, as the frequency and severity of droughts intensifies over the decades ahead. The crippling drought just this last summer surely reminds us of that.

Sea level rise is a corrosive threat to both housing and infrastructure along the region's extensive coastline. Deciding who will pay for the protection and managed retreat options agreed under the joint council and iwi-led Clifton to Tangoio Coastal Hazard Management Strategy is the next challenge for all councils involved in that strategy.

Major investments will also be needed in the flood-protection schemes of our main rivers, to ensure that they can cope with rainfall events of greater intensity and duration than could have ever been imagined when they were first designed.

Vulnerability to the risks involved is again increasing, and of more widespread concern than coastal erosion, with the stop banks protecting both our key urban areas and much of the horticultural land within the Heretaunga Plains from flooding.

The stark point is that if we under-invest in climate change adaptation on these issues, we ultimately won't have an environment or economy to sustain as a region. As a council, we are united and determined to confront this concern.

However, I also firmly believe that we have a responsibility as a local authority to show leadership on climate change mitigation. This means not just adapting to what climate change throws at us, but going further to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to lessen the overall risk in the first place.

In my role as chair of the Regional Council's Transport Committee, I am committed to funding options which reduce dependency on single occupant car trips through innovative public transport solutions, and in cycling infrastructure.

Bigger picture, though, I believe we need to set a regional blueprint through a strategic plan for a Net Zero Carbon Region, in which people can still live happy and productive lives.

In preparing such a plan, we need to take a fresh look at how we plan for growth in our towns and cities, including at how new houses are built, to make them more energy efficient. We need to look at how we commute to work, and at where we work. At the infrastructure we build for transport, energy generation and industry. At how we farm, to reduce methane emissions. At how we use water, for what and where. At the right mix of pastoral agriculture and horticulture.

These are all causes of human-induced climate change. They must all therefore be points of direct ground-level response.

The region has declared a climate change emergency. This cannot just be words on paper. We must act.

Returning to my daughter, if she and all our children are to have the future they deserve, there really is no choice. To fail to act in the face of what we know of the risks involved, would be nothing short of wilful blindness.

• Martin Williams is a councillor at Hawke's Bay Regional Council