Ruawai community climate adaptation pilot leader and former Kaipara deputy mayor Anna Curnow. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Ruawai community climate adaptation pilot leader and former Kaipara deputy mayor Anna Curnow. Photo / Michael Cunningham
A Ruawai leader is taking her community’s call to save Kaipara’s $1.5 million climate adaptation work to the Kaipara District Council.
Ruawai resident and former Kaipara deputy mayor Anna Curnow will be delivering a “Save Kaipara district’s climate adaptation programme” petition to the council meeting on November 29. As of November 14, the petition had more than 540 signatures.
“This is about saving Kaipara’s climate adaptation work and our Ruawai pilot as an important part of that,” Curnow said.
“If the [pilot] is cancelled the people of Ruawai lose the ability to decide for themselves, in a proactive way, how they respond to climate change.”
Her petition comes after Kaipara District Council (KDC) politicians on October 25 blocked key next steps of the Ruawai community climate change adaptive pathways pilot.
“Making an important decision like this for our community without asking the people who are involved, is a very faulty decision,” Curnow, a co-chair of the pilot’s 24-member Ruawai adaptive pathways community panel, said.
“The council hasn’t invited the climate adaptation community panel to be part of this.”
KDC, Whangarei District Council, Far North District Council and Northland Regional Council jointly chose Ruawai as Northland’s first community climate change adaptation pilot site in 2021 after assessing risks and community readiness.
Ruawai is also New Zealand’s first climate adaptation pilot in a district drainage scheme area.
The pilot covers the lives, businesses, marae and homes of residents across more than 8000 hectares of land predominantly at sea level or below, which is protected from the Northern Wairoa River and Kaipara Harbour by about 70km of stopbanks up to four metres high.
The pilot is a major feature of Kaipara’s climate adaptation work and for wider Northland, it provides information and modelling for other councils developing projects in this area.
Curnow started the petition on November 5 after KDC in September cancelled the already-budgeted development of its climate policy and council carbon emissions accounting.
“That opened the door to cancelling all of the climate adaptation work across Kaipara. It would leave vulnerable communities with no support to plan to address the very real risks faced,” Curnow said.
These communities included Baylys Beach, Glinks Gully, Tinopai, Pahi, Paparoa and Mangawhai.
“I could see what was potentially coming next,” Curnow said.
“Climate change impact will continue. What are we going to do to help inform adaption around that if we cancel Ruawai?”
She said the community was halfway through the about 2.5-year project to decide on how it wanted to adapt to the impacts of climate change locally.
More than a year’s work had gone into identifying risks and looking at different communities’ tolerance to those threats.
The next step was to break into sub-regions to develop community-led actions to address those risks.
But that step was blocked by KDC councillors in October.
“I’m not saying the process we are going through is perfect,” Curnow said.
She accepted some in the community were not in favour of the climate adaptation work, but said the majority were.
Local Democracy Reporting Northland asked Curnow for a response to Mayor Craig Jepson’s comment that climate-change-created sea level rise and managed retreat were not something Ruawai needed to be concerned about.
“I would prefer to defer to the scientists on this. All the papers the community panel has seen suggest significant risk in Ruawai,” she said.
“Further on, we will be able to mitigate this, but we need to work out what the processes around this might look like.”
Stopbanks up to four metres high protect Ruawai from the Kaipara Harbour. Photo / Susan Botting Local Democracy Reporter Northland
Jepson wants any remaining money from the $1.5 million of of KDC funds already-budgeted by the previous council for climate adaptation, including the Ruawai pilot, to instead go to the $14m Ruawai-Raupō drainage scheme.
The 100-year-old-plus scheme manages flooding risk through drains and stopbanks across 8700 hectares of land at sea level and below.
Jepson said it was better KDC put its money into the scheme, which was already protecting the district as had been the case during Cyclone Gabrielle, rather than the pilot.
But Curnow, who is also a past KDC Raupō drainage committee member, said Ruawai’s climate adaptation pilot was about more than ditches, drains, stopbanks and floodgates.
She said the scheme did a great job, but the pilot was about more than floods.
