Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Local government and climate change

Climate change effects due to the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be felt over time at regional and local levels, differently in different parts of New Zealand.

Following Agenda 21 [See Glossary.] and sustainable development principles, local authorities are best placed to plan for the region-specific effects of climate change and to help implement community adaptation to climate change, while central government addresses the causes of climate change in an international context.

In the last decade there has been a rapid growth in understanding of both the cause and impacts of climate change due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Local authorities need to keep aware of these changes so that they can plan adequately for their own communities' needs, and avoid liability for decisions where climate change may result in subsequent costs in the private sector.

Local government has a range of functions and responsibilities relating to managing climate change effects under the Local Government Act 2002, the Resource Management Act 1991 and other legislation. For regional councils these may include management of water resources, air resources and land resources where there are regionally significant management issues, biosecurity, natural hazards management, emergency management, and regional land transport. For city and district councils they include land-use planning and decision-making, building control, emergency management, and provision of infrastructure and community services. As well as an overall planning and management role, both regional and district councils own community assets (such as stormwater systems, water supply, or council-owned roads and bridges) which may be vulnerable to climate change effects.

An informed, considered and proactive approach to climate change issues must be built in to many areas of council planning and decision-making if risks and costs are to be minimised, and benefits are to be maximised.

Early planning may not only prevent a community from being locked into an inflexible response but may also result in considerable savings if remediation work is avoided.

While central government continues to steer the national response to climate change, the range of local government legislation will continue to involve councils in planning for the effects of climate change on their communities. Local government can also facilitate local and regional reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. This Guidance Manual concentrates on how climate affects local government activities, but parallel work is in progress for councils to contribute to emission reductions (Communities for Climate Protection).

1.2 Who is the Guidance Manual for?

Everyone has a stake in climate change, but this Guidance Manual is particularly directed at people who advise local government decision-makers. These are most likely to be:

• strategic and policy planners who need to evaluate and advise on long-term strategies and policy for the district and region
• asset managers charged with planning future asset needs for communities and resolving existing and emerging problems
• engineers charged with designing infrastructure which is adapted to meet foreseeable risks
• people handling resource, and in some cases, building consent applications
• people responsible for council databases, particularly those providing information on hazards and risks to private landowners and other agencies
• those responsible for emergency management and "lifelines".

Others, including councillors, consultants and community agencies will also find a wealth of useful information, adaptable to a wide range of uses, in this Guidance Manual.

1.3 Using the Guidance Manual

Understanding climate change, how it may affect different parts of New Zealand, and how to go about identifying and addressing local effects, is complex. Different people in local government have different needs.

The Guidance Manual is designed to provide comprehensive information to local government. Most users will not wish to read it from cover to cover, but will concentrate on the parts that help them deliver on their own responsibilities. To help people navigate through the Guidance Manual and find the aspects of most importance to them, we have:

• set out in Table 1.1 key questions that local government people ask, and identified the chapter in which the question is answered
• set out in the flow chart in Figure 1.1 a "roadmap" for those who need guidance on how to apply climate change information to a specific issue, problem or responsibility
• set out in the flow chart in Figure 1.2 a "roadmap" for those who wish to use the Guidance Manual to assist with overall policy development and planning.

Those who want to know more have the opportunity to access the most current scientific and practice information available on the subject though reading the whole Guidance Manual, along with other material referred to in Table 4.4 and in the References to the Guidance Manual.

The Guidance Manual will help local authorities to identify, scope and respond to climate change in their areas. It also sets out local government's responsibilities under a range of legislation. The Guidance Manual does not provide simple standard solutions for specific situations, since each region, district and community will have its own issues and priorities. Instead it provides examples and some suggestions, but expects that local authorities and communities will develop diverse and creative adaptive responses to climate change over time. This approach respects the diversity of social, economic and physical situations around the country and the mandate of local government.

Table 1.1: Answering questions - information in each chapter

View answering questions - information in each chapter (large table).

This "roadmap" is designed for people with specific issues for which climate and climate change play an important role. An example is an engineer charged with upgrading the stormwater drainage system for a city, who needs to use future rainfall projections to ensure the system will cope with the effects of climate change in 50 years' time. The boxes on the right show where to find guidance for each step.

This "roadmap" is for council staff or consultants tasked with identifying and prioritising climate change effects across a council's operations. The boxes on the right show where to find guidance for each step.

1.4 Context

This Guidance Manual aims to help people identify effects of climate change for their area, and to take account of these effects in their planning and decision-making processes. The intent is to help councils get ahead and plan in a proactive way for climate change where necessary, rather than to wait for changes and then react to them. A reactive mode is likely to be more costly and disruptive to communities affected by climate change.

Local government already addresses many effects of extreme weather events and climate variations in planning and providing services. The Guidance Manual outlines how climate change effects can be addressed as part of these existing regulatory, assessment and planning activities. It does not recommend a separate set of processes for dealing with climate change effects and impacts.

The prime focus is climate change risk assessment. While options for adapting and responding to climate changes are mentioned in passing, detailed consideration of such options will be covered in specific Guidance Manuals to be developed later. The scope of this Guidance Manual is the whole range of climate change effects. Coastal effects are covered briefly, since they are the subject of a separate Coastal Hazards Guidance Manual.

Many of the effects of climate change will be negative. Some will be positive. The Guidance Manual tends to focus on the negative aspects, as planning now can help avoid direct and indirect costs in the future, and many of the costs will be borne by the community as a whole, for which councils have a particular responsibility. However, some parts of New Zealand will experience changes which, if planned for in advance, can result in positive outcomes for areas and communities. Opportunities to benefit from aspects such as the increased temperatures that some areas will experience, will be maximised if forward planning identifies and plans for such benefits. Integrated planning may well be needed as, for example, opportunities to grow new types of crops may be maximised if a community also plans ahead for the management of its water resources to meet the needs of new crops. However, the availability of water resources themselves may be affected by climate change, which must be taken into account in forward planning.

Councils' long-term planning responsibilities provide opportunities to develop integrated adaptive approaches to climate change.

1.5 Reasons for identifying climate change impacts and adapting to them now

There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the past 50 years can be attributed to human activities that have increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Observed changes in regional climate have affected many physical and biological systems, and there are preliminary indications that social and economic systems have also been affected. Reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, even stabilisation of their concentrations in the atmosphere at a low level, will neither altogether prevent climate change or sea-level rise, nor altogether prevent their impacts. This is because of the inertia of the earth's interacting climate, ecological and socioeconomic systems.

These statements were all made in 2001 [Watson et al 2001.] by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [This is the body established by the United Nations to organise impartial expert assessments of climate change knowledge.] Given these findings, the IPCC concluded that "inertia in the climate, ecological and socioeconomic systems makes adaptation inevitable, and already necessary in some cases". The IPCC also stated that: "in the presence of inertia, well-founded actions to adapt to or mitigate climate change are more effective, and in some cases may be cheaper, if taken earlier rather than later". [Watson op cit.]

There are many uncertainties in predicting future climate changes and their effects. These range from difficulties in predicting future greenhouse gas emissions (which depend on social and economic development around the world), through to scientific and modelling uncertainties. The usual approach to addressing these global uncertainties is by considering a range of scenarios, which span plausible future emissions and incorporate model uncertainty ranges. The IPCC did this by producing the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), which is described in more detail in Chapter 2.

Climate projections [In IPCC terminology, a climate projection describes a potential future evolution of the climate in response to an emission or concentration scenario of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and is often based on a simulation by a climate model.] developed by the IPCC based on scenario analysis include:

• an increase in globally averaged surface temperature of 1.4°C to 5.8°C over the period 1990 to 2100 (for the SRES scenario range). This rate of warming is probably without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years
• both increases and decreases in annual rainfall (depending on location) of typically 5-20% at regional scales during the 21st century
• continued widespread retreat of glaciers throughout the 21st century
• a rise in global mean sea level of 0.09 to 0.88 m between 1990 and 2100
• a range of beneficial and adverse effects on both environmental and socioeconomic systems.

Projecting regional and local climate changes across New Zealand from these global projections requires further 'downscaling', since the global average does not necessarily apply to a given location in New Zealand. Chapter 2 summarises the region-specific climate projections across New Zealand associated with the IPCC emission scenarios. It explains that as well as uncertainties in global greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations, local and regional uncertainties also arise because of prediction differences between different regional climate models.

Given these uncertainties, it might be tempting to defer any actions to adapt to local climate change. This would be unwise, as New Zealand is already experiencing climate changes. These include a trend of increasing temperatures (about 0.7°C during the 20th century), a reduction in frost frequency over much of the country, retreat of South Island glaciers and snowlines and reduction of alpine snow mass, and a trend to rising sea level (estimated at 14-17 cm during the 20th century). Natural fluctuations in climate are also experienced from year to year and decade to decade, such as the changes in rainfall, droughts, sea level and coastal erosion associated with El Niño / La Niña conditions described in chapter 3. The wise approach is to take action now to identify and adapt to the significant effects of both natural climate variations and climate change. By ratifying the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change New Zealand has commitments to formulate and implement national and regional programmes containing "measures to facilitate adequate adaptation to climate change". [This quote is from Article 4.1(b), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.]

Despite uncertainties about the magnitude of regional climate changes, certainty is growing as to the direction of expected changes over the coming century. These directions include increasing temperatures over the whole country; annual average rainfall increases in the west of the country and decreases in many eastern areas; reductions in frosts; increasing risk of dry periods or droughts in some eastern areas; increased frequency of heavy rainfall events, and long-term increases in sea level.

The robustness of these findings, and the long-term and inexorable nature of climate changes, means that councils and communities do need to consider and plan for climate change. Of particular importance are infrastructure and developments with a long lifetime, which will need to cope with climate conditions in 50-100 years' time. Examples include stormwater drainage systems, planning for irrigation schemes, development of low-lying land already subject to flood risk, and housing and infrastructure along already eroding coastlines. Remedying problems with long-lived infrastructure later on is often going to be more expensive and disruptive to communities than taking future changes into account at the planning and design stage.

1.6 Methods

The IPCC has developed a seven step methodology for conducting a climate change impact assessment. This is shown in Appendix 1. This Guidance Manual recognises that climate change response decisions do not take place in a vacuum, but need to be integrated with the whole range of other responsibilities and issues that local government in New Zealand addresses on an ongoing basis through recognised processes. In general terms, this guidance is consistent with the IPCC-recommended approach.

Risk assessment is central to the approach promoted in this Guidance Manual. We draw particularly on AS/NZS4360:1999 (Risk Assessment), SNZ HB 4360:2000 (Risk Management for Local Government), and the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management's Guidelines for Developing a CDEM Group Plan (MCDEM DGL 2/02). These procedures are already well-known within local government, and allow effects of climate change to be considered as part of existing planning, assessment and regulatory activities.

Because climate change does not occur in isolation, this Guidance Manual strongly advocates the need to make planning for climate change an integral part of councils' standard work. Every function or service that relies on, or is affected by, climate parameters such as rainfall, sea-level or temperature, can potentially be affected by climate change. Standard methods used to consider the effects of climate on a council's responsibilities generally provide a good platform to consider the effects of climate change as well, and ensure that the consideration of climate change is done efficiently and at least cost while being relevant to the problem in question.

For climate change effects, the Guidance Manual suggests an additional "initial screening assessment" step in standard risk assessment procedures. Screening analysis uses simple initial estimates of how relevant climate factors will change, together with expert judgement or simple calculations of likely impacts of these changes, to test their significance for a council's activities. This approach can be applied either to one particular issue (such as the impacts of changed heavy rainfalls on stormwater systems), or to prioritising the relative importance of various climate change impacts. Further analysis for climate change is only needed when screening assessment suggests that there may be a significant issue, and/or there is clearly inadequate information to make a judgement based on a simple analysis.

A series of 'real life' case studies have been undertaken to 'pilot' this Guidance Manual. Reports from these studies provide examples that will be made widely available by the Ministry for the Environment for the use of local government, as part of a resource on emerging good practice in planning for climate change effects.

1.7 Summary

• Climate change is a real and internationally recognised outcome of increased amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It will have effects over the next decades that are predictable with some level of certainty, but which will vary from place to place throughout New Zealand.
• The climate will also change from year to year and decade to decade due to natural processes. For example, some parts of the country often have dry summers and autumns when an El Niño climate pattern is present. Both natural fluctuations and human-induced climate changes need to be considered when developing adaptation plans and policies, rather than just "greenhouse warming" effects on their own.
• Councils already address extreme weather events and climate variations as they develop plans and provide services. Climate change effects need also to be considered as part of these regulatory, assessment and planning activities. It is not necessary to develop a set of procedures for dealing separately with effects and impacts of climate change - they can be built into existing practices.
• Over time, climate change responses will involve iterative planning processes, keeping up-to-date with new information, monitoring changes, and reviewing the effectiveness of responses.
• The response to climate change involves international, national, regional, district and community consideration and action. The Guidance Manual aims to assist local government in working with its communities and making appropriate decisions.

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