Mike Williams: Drought, rising sea ignored at our peril

Mike Williams.

ONE of the few freebies that came with winning the Labour Party presidency in 2000 was a trip to the UK, all expenses paid, by an organisation called the British Council.
This outfit was formed in 1934 to promote British culture and international relations in the post-colonial era and someone had obviously decided that it was worthwhile trying to strengthen my anglophile instincts with this welcome jaunt.
It was probably unnecessary as an English grandmother who referred to the UK as "home" was an adored part of my early years in Hawke's Bay, but I was delighted to accept - not knowing that the departure date was to be shortly after the terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Centre known as 9/11.
This was to make the transition through Los Angeles prolonged and gruelling.
I chose climate change as one of my three interests and I was reminded of what I had learned on that sojourn when I read the paper on rising sea levels recently published by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright. My climate change experience in the UK consisted of a day-long visit to the Hadley Centre south of London. This research facility was the first in the world dedicated to climate change and it was the brainchild of Margaret Thatcher (she was a research chemist before becoming a barrister and politician).
At the end of a long day, the scientists who'd shown me around took me to a large lecture theatre featuring a wall covered with television screens.
Each showed a map of the world with rainfall change projections by about 20 top universities and research institutes. (I was pleased to see Auckland University featuring alongside Harvard and Oxford).
In the centre of the display was a double-sized screen which summarised all of the data courtesy of the centre's massive and dramatically styled Cray computer.
At that time, now nearly 15 years ago, the projections were alarming and I remember three commonalities between the displays. First, the central plain of India turns into desert; a disaster given that hundreds of millions of farmers now make it their home.
Second, much of the east coast of Australia becomes similarly desiccated, including the sites of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Third, New Zealand didn't look much different. I was obviously interested in why New Zealand seemed to be getting off so lightly, but the answer was not entirely encouraging.
An impressively bearded scientist told me that New Zealand had the great fortune to be "sitting in a huge cold pond" which would react slowly to global warming and that the devil was in the detail.
Although we may get the same amount of rainfall in 50 years, the distribution of that rain is likely to be much changed with the west of the country (Taranaki and the West Coast) becoming wetter and the east (Hawke's Bay, Canterbury) suffering regular drought.
Dr Wright focuses on one aspect of climate change we won't avoid - rising sea levels. She uses international research to project that sea levels will rise by 30 centimetres by 2050 and a full metre by 2100.
Hi-tech buoys planted in the Hauraki Gulf offshore from Auckland by the former Auckland Regional Council in 1990 clearly show that this process is already under way.
Some months ago, Tamaki Drive, a main arterial route from the east of the city into the CBD, was inundated by a king tide combined with ocean swells. The debate around local body amalgamation in Hawke's Bay never touches on the twin threats to the region of regular drought and rising sea levels, but it should. I went on Google Earth to look at Clifton Rd, Haumoana, and discovered that residents on the beach side have already set up tidal barriers.
These were not there when I grew up in the Bay and, sadly as King Canute found when he ordered the tide to pause, these won't work for long.
Over the next decades, it won't just be Clifton Rd residents with a problem if Dr Wright's science is correct.
Hawke's Bay Airport is barely above current sea level as, apparently, is the Napier CBD. It's not as though Napier is destined to become the Venice of the South Seas but with ambient sea levels at a metre higher than when the city and airport were planned and developed, king tides combined with adverse weather and unfortunate swell patterns mean that planning for regular flooding should be top of mind for Hawke's Bay's local body poobahs.
Right now we have the Hawke's Bay Regional Council alone trying to address looming water storage issues and no one I can find considering coastal flooding.
Perhaps if we all put our heads together in a united council some serious planning and preparation could begin.
# Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive officer of the NZ Howard League and is a former President of the Labour Party. He is a supporter of pro-amalgamation group A Better Hawke's Bay. All opinions are his and not the newspaper's.