Megan Woods: 'It's frightening': Climate change - the future is here, what are we going to do about it?

Devenish Place in Nelson after the floodwaters receded following heavy rain across the region on August 18. Photo / George Heard

Opinion

OPINION:

I don't know about you, but for me watching people in flood-hit Nelson gingerly going back into their homes to see the damage and hearing Nelson's mayor, Rachel Reese, say it will take years for the region to recover, stirred memories in me of Christchurch in those early post-earthquake days.

I think for many of us witnessing that fracturing of the sense of security that comes with your home being gutted made our collective hearts go out.

For us here in Canterbury we don't delude ourselves that there is anything anyone can do to prevent future earthquakes, but we do know that we have to build the right kind of houses in the right places to prevent the loss of homes we saw here post-quake.

Yes, it cast dark shadows but also, there were good memories - of communities pulling together, learning many lessons along the way. It brought about significant institutional, planning, and legislative change and left Christchurch and New Zealand much better equipped to deal with such events in the future.

So today I'm asking myself, are we learning the lessons yet that are literally raining down from the sky, flooding our communities and overwhelming the ability of storm-water systems to cope? No I'm not talking about urban planning changes, or Three Waters reforms.

I'm talking about climate change.

No one can refute what some of our Pacific neighbours were forced to grasp sooner than we did – that the climate crisis is no longer standing on our porches, it is knocking on our door. It's coming under the doors! To think that climate change used to be fluffy and woke. Or distant?

It's real. It's here. It's now. It's happening. It's wet. It's wild. It's frightening.

It's making people lose their possessions, their homes, and their dreams. You can't avoid seeing the impact all around us. The damage from these latest storms is immense and the reconstruction period, for some, will be long and hard.

For too long, in politics, the temptation has been to do everything in three-year cycles. From the left or from the right. And so understandably people, tune out.

But it's my job to remind you that policy and legislation and making plans isn't boring or have nothing to do with us. It works. Changes to RMA (including planning for climate adaptation), NPS-UD – and yes the Three Waters, may seem like a jumble of letters, and numbers, and a challenge on the status quo, but they are not. They are ideas that will drag us into the future, and while some people might find these challenging – how else should we prepare for what lies ahead?

Climate change and the wild and weird weather it brings has no politics. It doesn't care whose door it huffs and puffs down. So we must find a collective voice and we must look at Government reforms – not as a loss of control – but as a means of getting our groove back. We need to work together from local communities and iwi, along with local government and central government to get this right.

In the not too far distant future tens of thousands of New Zealanders and Pacific people living on the coastline will be affected by rising sea levels while infrastructure and freshwater sources could be inundated with water from the ocean and up above.

It's not only coastlines, we also know here in Canterbury inland inundation will affect communities. Can we trust our crumbling infrastructure and pipes to cope without sustained and well-planned investment? Do we want politics as usual with the opposition parties slinging mud from the sidelines at measures to prepare for the future?

Can we lift the conversation beyond pitting the infrastructure investment needed against the three-yearly promise to cut taxes?

I'm yet to hear an alternative plan to improve our drinking water, and upgrade our waste or stormwater pipes – how are we going to do this for the many?

• Megan Woods is the Minister of Housing, Minister of Energy and Resources, Minister of Building and Construction, and Associate Minister of Finance. She is a Christchurch local and has been the Member of Parliament for Wigram since 2011.