Kiwis will soon be able to find out what climate shifts will play out where they they live and work, with a new forecasting tool being developed in a million-dollar study. Photo / George Heard
Kiwis will soon be able to find out what climate shifts will play out where they they live and work, with a new forecasting tool being developed in a million-dollar study. Photo / George Heard
New Zealanders will soon be able to find out how their local climate will shift over coming decades, with a sophisticated forecasting tool being developed in a million-dollar study.
In their new project, a team of researchers led by climate scientist Dr Nathanael Melia aim to give Kiwis and companies a clearer idea of what risks they can expect as the planet continues to heat.
Melia, who recently launched his company Climate Prescience, said New Zealand was already facing the reality of a warming world.
Some insurers are now eyeing risk-based pricing around our coasts, where, within just two decades, one-in-100-year extreme flooding could become an annual occurrence for many places.
All told, the cost of losing properties and assets in currently flood-prone areas would amount to more than $100 billion.
Despite those risks, Melia, also a senior research fellow at Victoria University, said many of the country's companies and organisations lacked climate specialists who understood what lay over the horizon – and what that meant for their sustainability.
"Hydropower needs enough rainfall to replenish reservoirs, while agriculture is sensitive to drought," Melia said.
"However, some organisations have a diverse portfolio ranging from geothermal to horticulture, and others are driven by export and international markets: these climate relationships are less obvious."
In their study, being supported by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Endeavour Fund, the team will boil down masses of data and information into a simple, customisable tool.
As well as drawing on years of Kiwi research, the team will also partner with Nasa's Earth Exchange group, which has converted the UN's latest climate projections into a world-leading dataset.
Source / Nathanael Melia
"To simplify climate change, we're going to go right back to basics and define what a climate is."
Essentially, that was a seasonal cycle of temperature and precipitation – and it was local shifts within this combined "space" that would form the basis of the new tool.
How would it work?
"An organisation will choose their area of operation on the forecaster map and a time horizon they're planning for, and they'll then get a set of percentages that may say a 10 per cent increase in productivity, and a 40 per cent increase in risk," he explained.
"They may also be concerned about the international competition on global markets, so they can select their international competitor's location and might find that they face greater climate disruption than we will at home."
Melia expected the team's biggest challenge would be making its climate projections relevant for different users.
"We suspect that different sectors will be sensitive to various zones of the space," he said.
"For example, the snow-sports sector may only care about the winter months, while others will care about the growing season."
The project, running over three years, was partly inspired by the Government's recent move to mandate large businesses to begin disclosing climate-related risks and opportunities.
"I see some organisations using this tool as a first-pass screening for their climate risk," he said.
"Some may conclude that their risk and exposure are negligible compared to other areas of vulnerability in their operations.
"Others may discover that their risk is larger than they assumed, and they need to assess further where and why their portfolio is vulnerable."
The programme was among several climate-related efforts to receive major grants through the Endeavour Fund's latest round.
One study aimed to use artificial intelligence to generate hyper-local forecasts ahead of damaging weather events, while another would set up a new "knowledge hub" that councils could draw on to assess their own climate risks.
