Climate Change

Nick Aiken
Principal Urban Designer and Urban Planner, VisionUrban

Initially a statutory consents Planner, Nick’s 30 years as a Planner have evolved through policy, strategy and major strategic development roles, before stretching into urban design and CPTED. He developed a love of urban planning and urban form during his ‘OE’, working on very large south-central and east London brownfield regeneration mixed-use and transport projects. Returning to Aotearoa New Zealand in the early 2000’s he has since been a proponent of using urban form to enhance connectedness and wellbeing around place and space, reduce opportunity for crime, to promote adaptive use of space for lower impact infrastructure, and urban design-led greenfield subdivision and transport infrastructure. He considers a focus on urban form and community interactions to be a key part of community resilience.

Living on the hills immediately above the lower Esk Valley in Hawkes Bay, Nick was an unwilling observer to the destruction of Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023, and an unwilling participant in living through its immediate aftermath. This experience underlined some of the opportunities and challenges that communities face in the days and weeks following a climate disaster. It also emphasised the criticality of strong community in achieving resilience in the face of climate change ‘disasters’, and the key opportunities that placemaking and urban form can lend to achieving that resilience.

Nick has been Chair of the Central Branch of NZPI since 2016, was planning lead of the former NZPI Urban Design SIG (now the UDF), and is a practising Commissioner.

Iain White
Professor of Environmental Planning and Research, Waikato University

Iain White is Professor of Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato and an Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also been appointed as New Zealand's National Contact Point for the European Union Horizon Europe programme for 'Climate, Energy, and Mobility'. He has led or co-led over 20 research projects, many of which are within multi-million dollar programmes. These awards have come from a number of sources: research councils, the European Union, government agencies, NGOs, the Asia-Pacific network and the private sector. He is currently leading teams of researchers in the National Science Challenge: Resilience to Natures Challenges ($40m, 2019-2024), and also the MBIE Endeavour project 'Reducing flood inundation hazard and risk across Aotearoa-New Zealand' ($15.5m, 2020-2025).

Lara Clarke
Principal Coastal Adaptation Specialist, Auckland Council

Developed through a variety of roles, across a number of organisations Lara has a keen focus and interest in how we utilise planning and placemaking to improve wellbeing, reduce risk and vulnerability, increase community resilience, promote sustainability and economic and environmental outcomes.

Following her graduation from the University of Auckland Bachelor of Planning course Lara gained frontline planning experience in compliance & monitoring, land development and regulatory planning. This was complimented by the opportunity to lead the Auckland Council case team looking at the natural hazard and flooding provisions of the proposed Auckland Unitary Plan. Lara has more recently had a unique opportunity to explore this Kaupapa further through a research role with GNS Science | Te Pῡ Ao where she undertook research and led a team of specialists across planning and risk management. Laras current role at Auckland Council, as a Principal Coastal Adaptation Specialist, sees her leading a programme of work to develop a suite of coastal focused adaptation plans for council owned land and assets, including public open spaces, linear infrastructure, and community assets.

Sarah Cotterill
Principal Strategic Advisor in Climate Change and Sustainability, WSP

Sarah studied Environmental Science and through that followed a deliberately broad and varied study of topics from habitat protection & restoration, environmental management, issues in human geography....always interested in the interactions between different topics and not thinking about one thing in isolation.

Over the last 23 years Sarah has mostly worked in a consultancy capacity for local councils and government agencies and organisations. This experience has included sustainable transport strategies, environment impact assessment for large scale infrastructure and multi-use developments, post-planning construction environmental management and more recently natural hazards and climate risk and adaptation planning. Sarah is a Chartered Environmentalist and enjoys drawing knowledge from multiple disciplines, working collaboratively and helping colleagues and clients with decision making for outcomes that protect and enhance the natural environment and communities.