Modelling climate change risks

Aotearoa New Zealand faces substantial challenges to respond to natural hazard risks and climate change. This is compounded by the need to provide residential land for ongoing housing needs, and commercial and industrial land for economic development, while maintaining rural productive land for primary production. Scalable processes and frameworks are needed to support effective and efficient decision making which is both robust, replicable, and avoids maladaptation. This presentation will demonstrate ways in which risk modelling can be used to produce evidence-based risk assessments that incorporate different land use planning directions, hazard mitigation and adaption strategies, and risk acceptance / tolerance thresholds.

Replicable modelled climate change scenarios will be presented, comprising:

• Brownfield intensification and greenfield development with multiple hazards;
• Policy interventions (protect, avoid, reduce and accept) within a flood prone urban area;
• Changing residential land-use intensification settings and exploring adaptation options to address climate change and coastal inundation risk; and
• Exploring a component of a Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathway for a coastal settlement.

The results from these cases include: understanding with increased certainty when some residential dwellings can expect ongoing disruption due to coastal inundation, and the suitability of that as a trigger in a Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathway process; a future development area where no/one/multiple hazards are identified, which could be adopted as part of a regional spatial strategy; and how allowing for adaption and retreat in some areas, can reduce the overall risk in an area to an acceptable level.