Mount Maunganui's main beach at high tide as Cyclone Vaianu battered Tauranga on Sunday. Photo / Alyse Wright
By Kate Newton of RNZ
Senior climate scientists say the major funding for extreme weather research is drying up just as the country needs it the most.
In a joint comment provided to RNZ, three leading New Zealand researchers said there was little upcoming investment into understanding severe storms, even though that was how most New Zealanders were experiencing climate change at the moment.
Their perspective was supported by the New Zealand Association of Scientists, which warned that changes to science investment announced by the Government this month could see even more funding diverted away from New Zealand-specific climate research.
The Government said it invested around $170 million into climate-related research every year and “there will always be some who are disappointed at funding decisions”.
University of Canterbury Professor Dave Frame, University of Waikato senior lecturer Luke Harrington, and Earth Sciences New Zealand researcher Suzanne Rosier wrote that the vast majority of New Zealand’s extreme rainfall was driven by “atmospheric rivers” arriving from the tropics.
Recent research had made good progress in trying to understand how climate change was influencing that, but major projects were now ending, with little to follow them.
“Just as the costs of extreme weather are becoming more and more apparent, our ability to understand and inform adaptation actions has diminished.”
While rain events had been striking the country for “millennia”, things were now changing as Earth warmed, they wrote.
“As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapour. When those atmospheric rivers come out of the tropics, they contain more moisture than they did, providing the potential for more rain when they strike.”
Speaking to RNZ on the trio’s behalf, Dave Frame said researchers knew that storm behaviour was also changing, with total rainfall squeezed into a shorter timeframe.
“So that’s an amplification of those very wet events when they actually occur, often on quite short timescales of a few hours.”
Both ends of that rainfall distribution were changing, meaning longer dry and drought periods too, he said.
There were “large investments” in previous years to learn more about those atmospheric phenomena, he said, including two major Endeavour Fund research programmes totalling $25m, and the Deep South National Science Challenge, which Frame directed in its first year.
But all three of those programmes have now ended, with many outstanding questions.
“There’s quite a few questions about compound events, where you’ve got different sorts of events combining with each other in a way that really makes risks go up quite fast that we’re really still pretty uncertain about,” Frame said.
“Things like the particular timings of events, whether or not you get an atmospheric river at the end of a drought, what the interactions between things like snowpacks in spring, the melting snowpacks and an extreme rainfall event are like, the interaction between sea level rise and extreme rainfall.”
He and his colleagues worried there was little funding on the horizon to continue that work.
“I think a lot of people around the country would find [it] a bit crazy, actually, that just as... people are really feeling the sharp end of climate change through these extreme events, there’s been a bit of a walking back from investing in the science.”
In a statement, new Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Penny Simmonds said $170m was invested in climate-related research each year, alongside another $70m committed to the Natural Hazards and Resilience Platform between 2024 and 2031.
RNZ searched some of the major researcher-led contestable funds for climate-related projects.
Endeavour Fund grants for all projects with a major climate change element to them totalled $463m since 2010, with just under half of that to be spent between now and 2030.
However, only a fraction of that funding ($67m) went to research programmes or smaller projects looking at extreme weather patterns and modelling, or using that information to manage and plan community responses.
Of that, there is $46.5m still to be spent – about $9m a year until 2030.
A similar search of Marsden grants – another major public source of research funding – found $54 million awarded to 86 climate change-related projects.
That represented 4.5% of all Marsden funding since 2008.
Again, only six appeared to be projects looking specifically at climate extremes in New Zealand or the Southern Hemisphere, receiving $4.9m of funding between them.
In contrast, $29m was given to climate change projects looking at Antarctica, glaciers and oceans.
All of that work was also important, Frame said.
“Some nerd sitting in an office, you know, doing some advanced Python while a computer blinks at them doesn’t seem quite so cool.
“But all the things like extreme rainfall and other things which go on top of that, which usually really do the damage, storm surges and things like that – that stuff is much closer in time than the effects of the West Antarctic ice sheet in a couple of hundred years,” he said.
“The way that most New Zealanders are feeling climate change at the moment, which is through a stream of events, really isn’t part of those [other research] platforms at all.”
Association of Scientists co-president Lucy Stewart said the loss of a funding pipeline had been compounded by job cuts at Earth Sciences New Zealand and some universities.
A small team of specialist climate modellers – who translated global climate models into New Zealand-specific ones – were among 90 roles disestablished at ESNZ last year, following budget cuts.
“A lot of those climate modellers have gone, they’ve moved overseas, because they were disestablished.”
The Government had also ended Marsden funding for humanities and social science research, which would have an effect on climate research too.
“A lot of climate response work is social science. Things like, if you think about managed retreat, understanding how people think about it, communicating it to them, working with communities on what just transitions look like – all of that is social science.”
At the start of April, the Government announced it would back the recommendations in an advisory report to shift science funding to four priorities.
That included shifting $122m of current funding to a new “advancing technologies” priority over the next two to three years, which would include AI, quantum computing and advanced manufacturing.
That funding would be reallocated from other areas, including environmental science, Stewart said.
“If the Government wants to fund advanced tech, sure, they should do that, but they are robbing Peter to pay Paul and it will result in less climate research getting done.”
The result would be researchers lost to jobs overseas or other careers.
“We’ve lost about 700 people across the science system in the last couple of years in terms of cuts,” she said.
“We’re losing institutional knowledge, we’re losing connectivity, we’re losing networks of researchers... once it’s gone, it takes years and decades to get it back.”
Researchers were unlikely to come back into the system “because there’s nothing to come back to”.
Finding funding from alternative sources, such as philanthropy, was difficult, Stewart said.
“There are so many things on fire in New Zealand right now, if you look at the health system and education and the cost of living – competition for dollars is very high.
“You have to make a bloody good argument that people who want to do philanthropy are better off putting that money into research than making sure people can eat.”
The same argument could be made by the Government, “but they’re not doing much to make sure people can eat, either”, Stewart said.
Penny Simmonds said the new advanced technology research area was “critical to weather and climate research”.
The advisory report provided a clear path forward, she said.
“It will inform the development of the Science Investment Plan, which will set New Zealand’s long-term research priorities and align public investment with national missions.”
The plan will be released later this year.
One of the aims of the Government’s science reforms was to improve the training and retention of scientists, Simmonds said.
In addition, the Weather Forecasting Bill before Parliament would enable ESNZ to acquire MetService, which would “create efficiencies to reinvest in improvements to our climate science and weather forecasting capabilities”.
“That is already delivering real-world results, including direct support to emergency management during recent severe weather,” she said.
- RNZ