Building resilience

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Mike Mendonça, Chief Resilience Officer, Wellington City Council, leads the city’s efforts to adapt to climate change and prepare for natural disasters.

Mike Mendonça
Mike Mendonça

Q. Resilience is a term we often see. What does it mean to you?

As a word, resilience isn’t overly helpful – it means different things to different people. Engineers talk about pipe diameters and shear waves, accountants talk about total probable loss curves, policy writers talk about engaging stakeholders. None are wrong, but from my perspective, resilience is about communities, and all of our policy, engineering and finance is pointless if community isn’t at the centre.

Culturally, Kiwis are great at getting out of trouble. But resilience isn’t just the ability to get out of trouble – it’s also being smart enough and mature enough to avoid the tight spot in the first place.

Resilience isn’t just about earthquakes and floods. It’s about communities that look out for each other and individuals who understand themselves and each other. When things go wrong, history shows that the people who look after you are your neighbours.

Resilient communities look after each other before, during and after shocks and stresses. And being on a low income doesn’t mean you are not resilient – far from it. In city centres, for example, people living in apartments often don’t know their neighbours and can’t function without their iPhone charger, let alone power and water.

My job is to look at resilience from a city’s perspective, but individuals and communities are the building blocks.

Q. What resilience strategies is Wellington City Council putting in place?

We’ve already got a lot going on. Some things are high profile, like the council’s earthquake-prone buildings programme or the blue tsunami awareness lines, but we know we can do a lot more.

In infrastructure, we’re seeing the benefits of our regional water company, Wellington Water. It is looking across four cities to determine where we might invest in resilience and focusing on the needs of critical customers, such as the hospital. Wellington Electricity and the New Zealand Transport Agency are also looking at investing in resilience from a networks perspective. Most importantly, all three have joined-up thinking.

Later this year, we will be recommending a range of initiatives that will make a difference. Some will be simple like securing chimneys and joists, others will be more complex and time consuming. As an example, we know what liquefaction looks like now, so we need to think about where that will happen in Wellington and what we can do now to lessen the effect.

It’s hard to retrofit, but maybe we can minimise the effects of liquefaction by limiting what gets built in those areas in future. The same goes for sea level rise – why make things worse for future generations by building more in at-risk areas?

None of this will be easy. We have a love affair with real estate in New Zealand, and these things will directly confront that. But we have a responsibility to future Wellington and to our grandchildren. We won’t be doing them any favours if we wish away sea level rise or the earthquake we know will strike.

Our other duty is to learn from the Canterbury earthquakes. I don’t believe we have done this yet. My job is to put information in front of decision makers so they understand things like infrastructure, liquefaction, governance, community resilience building and heritage. Some of these went incredibly well in Christchurch – we need to bottle those things. Some didn’t go so well, and we need to try to avoid them.

Q. What challenges will climate change have on Wellington’s built environment?

We’re already seeing some coastal infrastructure damaged by changing weather patterns and sea surges. Increasingly, we’re seeing flooding in low-lying areas – the same pattern is emerging around the world. Insurers are watching closely, and the UK has already seen changes in the sector due to flooding. It’s highly likely people will not be able to purchase insurance in some areas.

Each degree of warming means an increase in moisture in the atmosphere – more rain, affecting our stormwater infrastructure. We also expect higher wind velocity.
Our population will grow substantially over the next 30 years, and those people will need houses. We have an opportunity to design communities that interact in shared spaces, that embrace urban agriculture, that have decentralised water storage and maybe energy production through microgeneration.

Q. Wellington has joined the 100 Resilient Cities movement. How will this work?

Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, the 100 Resilient Cities movement helps 100 cities around the world to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses of the 21st century. Wellington and Christchurch were selected for the programme from around 1,000 applications.

The programme gives us some funding, technical support and project management support – basically the capacity to develop and start to implement a strategy to grow our resilience. This doesn’t mean just doing more stuff, it means being smarter with what we’ve already got.

For us, the real value is in the network of 100 cities itself – cities that all think they’re unique but share many of the same challenges. We’ve learned a lot from Rotterdam about sea level rise, for example, and from New York about sea level rise and recovery from Hurricane Sandy. From San Francisco, we’ve learned about seismic issues and the cost of inaction with sea level rise. Equally, cities are keen to learn from us.

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Mike Mendonça
Mike Mendonça

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