But working in climate change, my immediate thought was: Does being displaced from land that is no longer safe to live on mean our community has climate refugees?
The term climate refugee has been around for a while and usually refers to the migration patterns we expect to see, say, from the Horn of Africa where devastating harvest failures and chronic food and water insecurity over the last three years may mean that it’s no longer feasible or safe to live there.
But the definition’s more mundane than that – “a person who has been forced to leave their home as a result of the effects of climate change on their environment.”
That definition discussion is probably one for the academics, but what is clear is that these decisions mark a momentous change in our national and regional climate change response.
In what should be considered exemplary collaboration, we’ve seen scientists, engineers and decision-makers work together with long-term resilience and community wellbeing in mind.
The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s engineers have provided flood-risk technical data and climate change predictions and local and central government have interpreted that data, along with other factors, to determine which areas probably now have an unacceptable level of risk – to human life, to infrastructure.
Could these decisions have been made after Cyclone Bola? Or after the 2018 floods that severely damaged roads and rail lines in Esk and Rissington?
Some, especially those who have been aware of climate change for a long time, might think so, but we weren’t ready back then.
Our leaders hadn’t declared a regional climate emergency, there was no national adaptation plan, no notion of managed retreat, and carbon footprints – was that something the dinosaurs left behind?
Up until Cyclone Gabrielle, in general, we didn’t have an awareness of region-wide and future risk, perhaps apart from tsunami and earthquakes which have been drilled into us since childhood.
We haven’t had a level of understanding that not all risk can be mitigated through engineering solutions.
Waka Kotahi, a government agency, announced last week that it had only recently started taking climate change into account in planning roading infrastructure (and in doing so, they realised some roads may no longer be viable to maintain).
We’ve come a long way in five years. Our understanding of future risk has come a long way, and our willingness to make change has too.
We have been able to establish a joint committee on climate action, bringing the region’s councils, taiwhenua and mana whenua together. Part of their mandate is to work on the underlying causes of this – to help our region transition to a less fossil fuel-dependent future and to support regional food production that works in future climate scenarios.
On another note, people who must leave their homes and the areas they are familiar with will need support to resettle and re-establish their lives in new places, and they will need new homes.
At a time in Hawke’s Bay where existing residents are fighting to block new housing construction projects in Hastings and Taradale, settling people displaced from the floods is going to take concerted construction effort and community willingness to welcome them.
It’s going to take an understanding of future changes (think Hawke’s Bay and the East Coast as national heatwave hotspots), to construct energy-efficient homes that provide protection across all seasons and allow less reliance on a national electrical grid that depends on coal and diesel burning to top up when hydro supply is low.
Our community members who need to relocate and are impacted by the cyclone deserve it.
Get in touch: climateaction@hbrc.govt.nz
Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is Climate Action Ambassador, HBRC.
