Conservation Comment: Fund needed for flood victims

Cyclone Ita hits the the South Island's West Coast. Four years on, farmers are still working to get farms back to where they were before this storm. Photo/file

At last! At last! "Sell, raise or move" — Chronicle, April 3, 2018. This was the advice from the Horizon Regional Council to the house owners along Anzac Parade, and elsewhere, whose houses have been repeatedly flooded.

Thank goodness we are not going to throw any more dollars at stopbanks. Instead, perhaps, we could start a fund to help those who have to abandon their houses, complete with whiteware, furniture, family memories ... to slips or floods.

With the technology of pole houses available it should be possible to lift the house up above most floods. Carparking would also have to be above its current site. And houses can be moved to other locations. The people living on some Pacific Islands now have to move on to the roof before every king tide, so we are not the only ones, nor will we be the last.

The Arctic seas are warming very rapidly, and this has pushed extreme snowstorms across the USA, Britain and Europe.

This is why some people do not believe in climate change; they do not realise that the "change" can be so diverse. Maybe, since the Antarctic seas are warming too, that is why we now have cold air from the South sweeping NZ.

And another brilliant move in Whanganui ... with the New World Supermarket diverting 97 per cent of its rubbish from landfill, and now earning money from its waste. This is an example other stores and supermarkets could follow.

This is a fantastic achievement, made with the help of Sustainable Whanganui, and Envirowaste.

What other ideas can we come up with?

As part of the building permit, the council could make the inclusion of solar panels compulsory in the design of every new house or building.

When I read Thursday's Chronicle, I had to abandon the last half of my Conservation Comment. Paul Dykes articles Global Report and Weather more than covered my piece. Thank you, Paul.

I know some of you (unfortunately) do not read The Country segment, so I will record some of the most relevant items:

■Three of the top 5 concerns listed by the World Economic Forum as most at risk are environmental.

■The WEF report identifies the most pressing environmental challenges to be:
Extreme weather events and temperatures; accelerating biodiversity loss;
pollution of air, soil and water; failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation; and transition risks as the world moves to a low-carbon future.

■Four years after ex-cyclone Ita, farmers are still working to get farms back to where they were. How long before it is realised that much of the damage caused by extreme weather events is not repairable?

Hurricane Harvey caused at least $2 billion worth of damage.
There is a $10 billion fund created by President Trump for Houston, but still thousands of people are homeless.

■Sara Dickon is a founder member of Sustainable Whanganui