Horizons Regional Council's Rachel Keedwell: No commitment to meaningful action at COP26

Climate change will mean more frequent and bigger floods, therefore it is important our flood defences remain fit for purpose. Photo / Horizons Regional Council

OPINION:

With the closure of the climate discussions in Glasgow last week, it seems appropriate to talk about what Horizons is doing in the climate change space.

Although we have factored climate change into many areas of our business over the past five to 10 years, things like assessing flood protection effectiveness under different climate change scenarios, we have for many years had members of our community asking us to take more direct action.

Horizons has become increasingly active in this space over the past two years. We have established the Climate Action Joint Committee which consists of myself as the regional chairwoman alongside all the region's mayors and seven tangata whenua members.

The aim of the committee is to work together as a region to help prepare for the impacts of climate change but also to address how we can mitigate our own effects. The use of the word action in the committee title is intentional to keep the focus on what we can do.

Horizons has put in place its first climate action strategy for the purpose of council planning.

One of the first pieces of work was a region-wide climate change risk assessment to assess the key risks across the region and to identify particular communities that are more vulnerable to the risks. The joint committee will use this assessment as the basis to design a regional action plan.

We are working with Massey University to assist with an adaptive pathways project – this takes two of our smaller at-risk communities and will work through how to best ensure the communities are resilient into the future.

We have a fulltime climate change coordinator starting in the next month. One of the coordinator's first jobs will be to set up our new contestable fund for community projects. This was approved in our recent long-term plan and puts aside $50,000 for assisting with community projects in the climate change space.

We have ongoing research on how climate change will affect erosion and sedimentation, which will directly impact our flood defences in places like Palmerston North.

We have put together our own organisational greenhouse gas emissions inventory and the next piece of work is to set an emissions reduction plan for the council.

The COP26 talks in Glasgow underscore the importance of working hard to ensure our communities are well equipped to face the effects of climate change and are resilient to the risks.

The only certain outcome from those talks is that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise and so too will global temperatures.

There was no commitment to any level of meaningful action – action needed to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees and to alleviate massive risk to human life, therefore it is essential we take as much action as we can to secure the future for our communities.

• Rachel Keedwell is chairwoman of Horizons Regional Council.