Hinewai Ormsby: Let's meet climate crisis as a community

Hinewai Ormsby says nature has an incredible ability to restore and heal from trauma. Photo / File

It's not easy to look at the climate crisis and know what to do about it.

It's not easy to get to grips with the fact that we're heading towards a world with higher temperatures, volatile weather events, irreversible loss of biodiversity, disease, and resource depletion.

It's not easy to change how we live and what we prioritise for something that seems far away.

But we need to, and – more importantly – we can. By coming together we can meet what seems like a huge challenge, and do it as a community.

We need to come to grips with the realities of the climate crisis and what it means for our whānau, our farmers, and businesses in Hawke's Bay. We can't solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.

At the Hawke's Bay Regional Council we have declared a climate emergency and are aiming for the region to be carbon neutral by 2050.

We are working hard to meet this complex challenge through a comprehensive body of work; our Sustainable Homes energy efficiency programme, coastal hazards strategy, water security investigations, expansion of our tree planting particularly on eroding hillsides, along waterways and around wetlands, flood protection, and guiding the next generation of environmental leaders.

Now is the time to support and nourish bold leadership on this issue to confront it and build an environmentally prosperous future – a pathway to bring our people alongside us.

This leadership has many different faces in different settings, within whānau, in community groups, schools, and as well as a regional and national level.

It's grandparents being the educators and teaching their mokopuna about the environment, how to gather kai in its natural habitat and value that environment, it's parents listening to their children's fears of the future and responding, and it's teaching children how to live more sustainably.

It's not all doom and gloom - this is an opportunity, our opportunity. We need to start from the ground up, and have honest and brave conversations with each other about a community response.

We know nature has an incredible ability to restore and heal from trauma, and we can help with this. We need to start working with nature and stop thinking we are separate from it.

What does this look like? This is about planting more trees, and protecting and enhancing our biodiversity, and walking more instead of driving our cars. It looks like reducing our individual and household wastage and understanding where, from and how our food arrives at our dinner table.

As a regional council we work in partnership with landowners to plant trees, and we can build on this – to create a strong community movement in Hawke's Bay to plant trees, at scale, in our backyards, in our council open spaces, on our farms, and along our precious waterways.

I believe that collaborative energy can achieve a great deal, like our home nursery that grows 4000 native trees a year to then be planted along landowners' and farmers' waterways.

If every year, a person in Hawke's Bay pledged to grow a tree, and plant it, then 166,368 trees would go in the ground annually.

The accelerated growth of this collaborative energy, to at least challenge the status quo, is needed to make the difference we need for a better state of a prosperous future environment.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Hawke's Bay Regional councillor Hinewai Ormsby is chair of the environment and integrated catchments committee