We’ve been projected from the hypothetical to the real and there’s silt dust under our fingernails and in our lungs.
Winter last year, we looked at pictures of flooding in Nelson and Wairoa.
Glaciers melting and 33 million people displaced from floods in Pakistan. At the time, perhaps many of us felt immune to anything like that in our beautiful corner of the world.
In our Hawke’s Bay of Great Things Grow Here, our fruit bowl for the nation. Hawke’s Bay of wineries, art deco festivals and cruise ship tourists on V8 supertrikes.
But none of us are immune, and the latest disaster shows us in stark reality just what that looks like.
Let’s be clear about protection. I hear climate events being misleadingly called “one-in-100-year” storms, “one-in-500-year” floods, as if once you’ve had one, you are safe for the next 99 or 499 years. But that’s a misnomer.
A one-in-100-year storm just means there’s a minimum of 1 per cent chance it will happen this year. Protection to that level means there is about 1 per cent chance those defences won’t be enough to contain the stormwaters.
There are two really big problems with this terminology.
Firstly, if you remember the Gambler’s Fallacy from School C maths, if a 1 per cent-chance flood happens this year, it doesn’t mean we won’t have another one next year.
The probability of it happening is always 1 per cent. Engineers know this, but you could easily be forgiven for thinking one-in-100-year floods were like the five-yearly census and come around only when they’re supposed to.
The other problem is, those probability calculations are true only under the present degrees of warming. We’re now at 1.2 degrees of warming. There’s already enough warming “locked in” by previous carbon emissions, we know we’ll reach at least 1.8 degrees, even if we massively reduce the emissions trajectory. Each tiny bit of warming puts our communities at exponentially higher risk of severe and catastrophic weather events.
So what can we do?
As we move from emergency response to recovery and rebuild, we need the courage to engage in uncomfortable conversations in our communities.
We need to support one another through that and rally throughout the region. Where can we live safely? What level of risk are we happy to live with?
Physics has outpaced politics and there’s no time to pass the buck or ask whether it’s our mandate. It’s all of our mandate.
But more than ever, we must ask how we can slow this thing down. We’re in a leaky boat and we can’t just keep bailing out the water; we have to try to close up the leaky hole. Slow down the catastrophic events.
We need climate-resilient development that provides protection and reduces emissions. Investment in roads and houses that works in harmony with natural resources and isn’t emissions heavy.
Rewilding and nature-based solutions for rural and urban areas. We need to urgently stop burning fossil fuels and “using the sky as an open sewer”, to quote Al Gore.
We need leaders who really understand the urgency and who are prepared to make the hard decisions. I’m sure you’ll all agree we never want to see the heartache we’ve seen in Hawke’s Bay, ever again.
– Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is the climate action ambassador at HB Regional Council. You can get in touch with her at climateaction@hbrc.govt.nz
