Neighbourhoods, communities and even entire towns may in the future be moved away from hazard-prone areas more likely to be damaged or destroyed in natural disasters like the floods and storms that battered the North Island killing some and leaving others homeless.
With houses tumbling down cliffs in Auckland and properties throughout the North Island submerged in water from extreme flooding as Cyclone Gabrielle unleashed her wrath, industry experts are calling for more to be done to protect people and properties in these areas that are likely to be sitting targets for more extreme weather events rocking the country.
University of Auckland professor in sociology Steve Matthewman, who studies the sociology of disasters, said a managed retreat, which is when dwelling spaces and populations are relocated elsewhere into safer areas, needs to start happening now.
“You don’t want to put people in the face of known catastrophic risk. If you think about some of these places in Auckland – some of these places at the bottoms of cliffs and tops of cliffs that have been red stickered – it's highly unlikely anyone would sanction rebuilding there – it's just too dangerous. It’s the same in Muriwai – those cliffs are just too unstable.”
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While moving someone from a property that had already been damaged by a storm and deemed uninhabitable was one thing, taking people from their homes in an area they loved before a disaster happens was more challenging, he said.
“The difficulty is telling whole communities, ‘sorry you’re not a community any more. This is your home and it might be a place you are deeply connected to and a place you love, but you can’t be here anymore’.”
Only once in New Zealand’s history has an entire community been moved and this was after the Christchurch earthquake when 7400 homes predominantly in the city’s eastern suburbs were red zoned because the land was deemed unsafe and too expensive to be built on again.
Along with relocating people from extreme at-risk areas, he also believes there will be changes to local government planning policies and government adaption and mitigation strategies to prevent properties and areas being wiped out in the future.
“I think what you are going to see is a tightening up of legislation in hazard-prone places.”
These places include coastal areas such as sea level rise, close to rivers, tops of cliff and in flood plains.
“Hopefully there’s going to be a greater emphasis on what we call sponge or soak cities. Smarter regulation, much smarter urban design for infrastructure and building so we don’t have these massive concrete jungles that hold and channel water in huge volumes.”
Houses in the Esk Valley, in Hawke's Bay, were smashed by Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Warren Buckland
Along with this, Matthewman said more intensive climate mitigation is needed, especially with US research showing that for every dollar spent on mitigation a further $5 or $6 is saved in fix-up costs after a disaster.
Insurance Council of NZ chief executive Tim Grafton hopes the last few weeks have been a big wake-up call around what climate change could bring and how work needs to be done to reduce the risk to extreme weather events particularly when it comes to people in properties in high-risk locations.
“You want to reduce risks not because of the affordability of insurance, but because we want to avoid death as we’ve seen from the fatalities of the last two weeks, we want to avoid social trauma of getting two metres of silt out of your house, we want to avoid the contamination of food, the loss of treasured possessions, the total destruction of where you are living and ultimately these areas will become less attractive to live which again will play out in terms of the value of the properties.”
The measures that need to be carried out to prevent risk will differ from location to location, but he agrees with Matthewman that it could include relocating people, streets or entire communities.
“If we do nothing about reducing risk, and insurance is all about the transfer of risk, then insurance will over time reflect in its premiums and excesses the increasing risk, or whether or not it wants to accept the risk,” he said.
CoreLogic chief economist Kelvin Davidson: “Theoretically, if insurance is going to cost you more, your house is worth less really because it’s costing more to run.” Photo / Peter Meecham
“Here’s the opportunity to look at what we do in future as we look to recovery – do we just build everything back in the same place to the way it was or do we look at potential areas where we could be in less risky areas to protect people in their property.”
CoreLogic chief economist Kelvin Davidson agrees it is a national issue that could result in people changing their mentality around living by rivers and the sea and on cliff-sides, which have previously been seen as desirable areas.
“Does that genuinely change and people go, ‘no, you know what I don’t want to live in that area any more’. Do we change where we build?”
Rather than moving people away from existing areas, Davidson said the government may instead take a strong stance around where new subdivisions can be built and avoid areas where there is known flood or earthquake risk.
He also questions whether people living in what are deemed as riskier areas may in the future have to pay more in insurance premiums and if this will in turn lower the value of their properties.
“Theoretically, if insurance is going to cost you more, your house is worth less really because it’s costing more to run. So, the theory would tell you a buyer would pay less to buy it.”
- Cyclone Gabrielle: Click here to donate to the New Zealand disaster fund
