Call to adapt buildings now

This Issue This is a part of the Climate change feature

By - , Build 174

Now is the time to act on climate change as delays will cost the country billions. That includes thinking about where buildings should be located and designing them to cope with unpredictable weather from floods to droughts.

IT’S BEEN an expensive decade for severe weather events. Over the past 10 years, insurers have paid out more than $1.16 billion to help people affected by storms and other severe weather events. On top of that, estimates put the uninsured cost at roughly the same, if not more. These costs are projected to rise as the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt.

Thousands of buildings at risk

The statistics around the exposure to sea-level rise alone are staggering. At the Insurance Council of New Zealand (ICNZ) conference last year, we looked at the issue of climate change. We heard from Rob Bell from NIWA, who said that, according to their research, there are more than 125,000 buildings and $38 billion in replacement costs within 0–1 m of sea-level rise. A more recent report from NIWA indicates that with every 100 mm of sea-level rise, an additional 7,000 buildings will be at risk.

Sea-level rise compounds extreme weather events, which will become more frequent and severe with climate change. The poor state of stormwater drains installed decades ago to meet what were then 1-in-10 year flood events hints at the scale of resilience that may be demanded. With near certainty that the sea will rise a further 200–300 mm in the next 20 years, there are significant costs looming on the horizon for everyone.

Climate change emergencies declared

It’s no wonder so many councils around the country have declared climate change emergencies. Even those without coastal boundaries will be affected by the coming storms and not always in expected ways.

Take the community of Matatā in the Bay of Plenty. Thirty plots of land have been declared unsafe to live on, not because of the coast in front of them but because of the stream beside them.

Storm surges can cause the stream to swell so severely it brings boulders down the mountain with it, depositing them on the houses currently occupying that land and putting the lives and property of the residents at risk. The council thought they could mitigate it, but it turns out they can’t, and now 30 families have to leave their homes and find safer land.

No one is free from the consequences

All of this is to say that no one in New Zealand will escape the consequences of climate change. The sooner we start adapting to it, anticipating these impacts and putting strategies and infrastructure changes in place to reduce the impact, the less it will cost us all. The Zero Carbon Bill is creating a long-term framework to do this through a national adaptation plan and assessment, but that doesn’t mean we can be complacent.

Communities, councils and climate change experts are increasingly asking ICNZ to engage with them about future insurability. They fear that no insurance means no bank support, which in turns means loss of property value, potential depopulation and loss of community.

This is not a future that insurers want. We want to see resilient adaptive communities that are built to reduce the impacts of climate change on community members and allow building occupants to get back to normal quickly and with little cost.

To achieve this vision, everyone needs to play a part. Central and local government need to focus on adaptation as well as climate change mitigation because its impacts will keep coming for the foreseeable future, even if significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are made.

Need for adaptation and mitigation

Infrastructure needs to be updated, guidelines need to be amended and stop banks, dams and seawalls need to be revisited. Councils need to look critically at the risks to property around their region and not consent development in places that could be hit severely and regularly in the not-too-distant future.

Buyers need to be provided with the guidance and resources to understand the risks facing land they’re considering purchasing, not just now but 20-plus years into the future, as does anyone building or renovating.

Low-damage resilient buildings needed

Building is critical in all this. New builds and renovations need to be done with the risks to the site accounted and planned for. Water tables, drainage, established or competing infrastructure, extremes of climate and topography are just some of the considerations that need to be made. We need to be designing and building houses and commercial buildings that can withstand a variety of different weather events and temperature extremes.

Buildings that are designed for low damage, are more resistant to high winds or have higher finished-floor levels and larger-capacity stormwater systems would be more effective at recovering from or withstanding major storms than many current buildings.

Although these innovations are often expensive upfront, they reduce costs for everyone in the long term and help reduce the risk transferred to insurers, which in turn helps to keep insurance costs down.

Call to act now

Acting sooner rather than later matters. Research from Westpac has shown that delaying adaptation over the next decade will cost New Zealand around $30 billion. In fact, the longer we delay adaptation work and the more slowly we adapt, the higher the costs everyone will face. Worse still, failing to adapt altogether will be the costliest option of all.

One year ago, we said we need to act soon so that we don’t find ourselves in 2024 still planning and building for a 1970s environment. One year on, the message hasn’t changed much. Let’s act now so that, in another year’s time, we aren’t still saying the same.

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