Funding HB coastal protection

A long-serving HB Joint Committee, chaired in recent years by Regional Councillor Jerf van Beek, has just passed over to the Hastings, Napier and Regional Councils for their endorsement the Clifton to Tangoio Coastal Hazards Strategy 2120.

We’ll be discussing the full content of the adaptive 100-year plan to protect our coasts in the face of climate change in our September/October BayBuzz magazine.

But at the nub of the adaptation issue is, who pays? In a previous article, BayBuzz reported where our local leaders have come down on proposed regional private and public cost sharing.

The NZ Climate Change Commission weighed in on the funding issue in a Report issued this week assessing what it terms NZ’s “insufficient” attention to adaptation. The Commission says:

“Clearly setting out how the costs of adaptation and climate-related losses will be shared, and how they will be paid for, will help enable Aotearoa New Zealand to adapt in a more efficient, fair and equitable way.

“There is currently no national funding framework for climate adaptation, and no clarity around how adaptation costs will be met. Adaptation in Aotearoa New Zealand is delayed because it is not clear how it will be paid for.

“Progress in developing a national funding framework for adaptation has been slow, but recent developments are encouraging. For adaptation to be effective, there needs to be more focus on funding prevention and risk avoidance. New instruments for investing public funds and leveraging private investment in adaptation are also needed.”

The Report indeed comments on HB’s coastal hazards planning effort, noting it started ten years ago, but then: “In 2018, the Strategy was endorsed; however, it came to a standstill as further work was needed to clarify how to share the costs of adaptation action, and how roles and responsibilities for implementing the strategy should be allocated.”

Well, our councils have finally sorted their struggling with the issue. The ball is now in the Government’s court. Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Joint Committee is supposed to recommend a national adaptation framework in September. Presumably that will include a funding scenario.

Hopefully this warrants the attention of our HB Regional Recovery Agency. Fingers crossed.

The Commission visited Wairoa in preparing its Report and was clearly impressed by the community’s resilience and self-assessment of its challenges, recording all this in an excellent case study (see pp 142-144 of the Report).