OPINION:
Last month’s floods have forced climate change onto the agenda and neither the Auckland mayor, nor the PM, can afford to ignore it. By Danyl Mclauchlan.
There is a political rogues’ gallery of terrible leaders during times of national crisis. George W Bush vacationed at his ranch during Hurricane Katrina. Boris Johnson held drunken parties at Number 10 while his nation was in lockdown. And Scott Morrison holidayed in Hawaii while bushfires burnt across Australia. When challenged by journalists, Morrison uttered the immortal line, “I don’t hold a hose, mate.”
It seems we can add Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown to this ignominious identity parade. Invisible during the early stages of Auckland’s unprecedented flooding, then visibly irritated at being questioned by media during a civil emergency, he riffed off Morrison’s infamous line by insisting that it wasn’t his role to rush out with buckets.
When RNZ broadcaster Kim Hill questioned him about Auckland’s emergency response, he replied, with barely concealed relish, “It will be interesting to see just how well prepared Wellington is when the earthquake strikes.” The interview ended when Hill asked if the tap water was safe to drink. The response was a long pause, then, “I’m heading to a briefing right now. I’ll just add that to the list.”
Brown’s political brand was built around his identity as an anti-politician. He could cut through the council bureaucracy and the intransigence of central government. He’d get things done. It was a clever campaign strategy, turning his contrarian, irritable demeanour into an asset. Then, in a leaked group chat message, the mayor complained about having to cancel a tennis game to “deal with media drongos over the flooding”. The name of the group was “Grumpy Old Men”. But there’s more to leadership than grumpiness, and getting things done does require doing things, especially in an emergency. There’s an old political adage: a politician who complains about the media is like a sailor who complains about the sea. And this is even true for anti-politicians, especially when their city is drowning.
When Brown fronted for questions over the weekend after the first deluge, he appeared beside Chris Hipkins. The new Prime Minister was mostly silent, his eyes occasionally bulging in disbelief as the mayor snarled his way through the event. Hipkins must have had many things on his mind – coordinating the emergency response, the scale of the disaster, the logistics of the rebuild. It would have been only human to wonder about the politics of it all.
Crisis management
New leaders usually enjoy a bump in the polls, but not always. When David Cunliffe took over Labour, the numbers remained dire. When Judith Collins became National’s leader, the party’s popularity declined. And now Hipkins was faced with a national crisis – Jacinda Ardern’s core competency – on only his third day as her successor. How could he measure up?
On the Monday after the standup, two public polls were released, both putting Labour back in the lead. Hipkins did not poll as strongly in the preferred prime minister stakes as Ardern had, but he was still slightly ahead of Christopher Luxon. He was not as dazzling in a crisis as his predecessor but he must have consoled himself – as he watched Brown’s deputy tugging the mayor away from the media – with the knowledge that it could have been an awful lot worse.
Hipkins has sniffed the wind and staked his leadership on economic issues. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Aucklanders, and other New Zealanders who have had to deal with natural disasters over the past few years, will completely let him off the hook on climate change.
On the night of January 27, Auckland suffered an entire summer’s worth of rain in 24 hours. The streets drowned, the airport flooded, the water swept away bridges, buses, cars. It derailed trains, wrecked supermarkets, tore houses off their foundations. One man died when a landslide hit his property, three others are believed to have drowned and three children stumbled from the rubble screaming and covered in mud.
We can’t say definitively that the floods were caused by the changing climate. There have always been storms, and weather events are too chaotic and too complex to trace back to a single factor. But for decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as our planet warms, the amount of energy and water vapour in the atmosphere will rise, and this will increase the number and severity of natural disasters. This may be heat waves, droughts or torrential rains exactly like the deluge that devastated Auckland and other regions of the upper North Island last month.
Climate policy is tedious until suddenly it isn’t. For the past 20 years, it has swirled around the periphery of our politics. The policy debates are an incomprehensible vortex of scientific, economic and bureaucratic jargon – carbon leakage, carbon sequestration, carbon credits, carbon offsetting, carbon neutrality – litigated via a stream of seemingly endless, seemingly pointless UN conferences.
The Green Party has never shut up about the subject, and over the years, National and Labour governments have delivered and tweaked the emissions trading scheme – a carbon market that didn’t seem to accomplish very much – while signing us up to various international commitments and pledges, most of them non-binding.
Warmer world
In 2017, Jacinda Ardern declared that climate change was her generation’s nuclear-free moment. But the zero-carbon policy has been pushed through by Green Party co-leader James Shaw, who openly seethes over Labour’s inertia. Over the past five years, Shaw has negotiated a bipartisan consensus on climate and National supported his legislation. But it’s remained a niche concern among voters. In last year’s Ipsos issues poll, fewer than one in five respondents thought climate change was important.
Most people worry about crime, the economy and the cost of living. The murky complexities of carbon emissions never felt real to the wider public. But a landslide through your house feels pretty real, and as the water rises, climate change is forcing itself into the political mainstream.
In a combative press conference the day after the Auckland flood, Wayne Brown declared, “Some of those houses, when you think about it, actually shouldn’t have been where they are.” For distraught residents whose homes had just been destroyed this was, perhaps, not the comfort they’d sought in their time of crisis. But climate adaptation experts bleakly concede that New Zealand has done a poor job of regulating its housing and infrastructure in preparation for a warmer, wetter world.
We have built – and in some regions continue to consent – homes and even communities that cannot be protected from extreme weather events. Some of the new social and affordable housing projects – fast-tracked to address the housing crisis – are on flood-prone land because it is cheap.
The Government’s climate adaptation plan was released last August, and it contains many references to “managed retreat”, a gentle euphemism for the gradual dismantlement of communities that are extremely vulnerable to storm surges, landslides, sea-level rises. It estimates that about 750,000 New Zealanders and 500,000 buildings worth more than $145 billion may need to be relocated or abandoned over the coming decades.
You can’t abandon Auckland, though. Or Christchurch, which is even closer to sea level and experienced record floods last July. Or even Wellington – desirable as this may be for some – which broke its own rainfall record last winter and saw a torrent of slips and road closures as the city’s hills dissolved into sludge.
Parts of these cities will no longer be viable in the decades to come: houses perched on eroding cliff tops, suburbs constructed on flood plains. During the 20th century, our towns and cities were rebuilt to accommodate cars. This century, they’ll be rebuilt again to accommodate water.
Sponge cities
Adaptation experts urge us to transform our urban spaces into sponge cities: areas that can absorb massive rainfalls without flooding. Auckland is already surprisingly spongy: it has parks, golf courses, residential gardens. A 2022 study rated it as 35 per cent sponge, while concrete-clad London is only at 22 per cent. But it still contains a lot of car parks and infill housing, and these make for poor drainage solutions. True sponginess will require drastic change: the construction of urban wetlands and making “room for rivers”. This will involve conceding open space for waterways instead of channelling them through stormwater systems and embankments, so they have plenty of space to flood when the rain comes.
It all sounds so nice – thriving natural ecosystems in the inner city – until you consider the cost, the impossibility of the politics and our nation’s very poor record on planning and infrastructure.
Whose communities will be transformed into lakes and ponds? Which coastal and riverside properties will be saved, and which will be abandoned? How can we reconcile our desperate need to build more housing with the equally desperate need for riverways and green spaces? Given the speed at which the government is delivering a central rail link in Auckland, how do you rate its chances of turning an area of the city into a wetland before the end of the century?
And how much will it all cost? The estimated spend on the Three Waters scheme – a 30-year project to upgrade the nation’s dilapidated drinking water, stormwater and sewage infrastructure – is $185 billion. No one has a realistic estimate of the price tag on climate adaptation: only that it is a number so large it can only be computed as a percentage of national gross domestic product in perpetuity. The only reason our politicians are considering committing such an oceanic sum is that it’ll cost us even more if they don’t.
