Hi everybody, welcome to our webinar on climate change adaptation. I'm Wayne Murphy, I'm a senior consultant with Elliman-Clark and prior to coming to the firm here I have about 30 years in central and local government roles. I'm just going to introduce the other members of the panel here today.
Kia ora everyone, I'm Sean Stack and I'm a senior consultant at Elliman-Clark. Prior to joining Elliman-Clark I spent just about three years working at the Waitangi Tribunal across a range of enquiries, probably most relevant for this webinar today was the Porirua ki Manawatu District Enquiry and the National Freshwater and Geothermal Resources Enquiry. Kia ora everyone, looking forward to today.
Kia ora everyone, my name is Jess Anderson, I'm also a senior consultant here at Elliman-Clark. I've been with the firm for about two and a half years and I mostly work in the climate change and sustainability space and I've led quite a few engagements as well on behalf of our clients. Good afternoon, I'm Adolph Stroomberg and I'm Chief Economist at Infometrics where I've been for rather a long time.
I've been working on climate change issues probably since the mid-1990s mostly on mitigation and more recently more emphasis on adaptation, hence my presence here. Wayne. Thank you all.
We've run quite a number of webinars over the last few months and this issue is one that people have requested that we dive into but there is so much that you could talk about when it comes to climate change and so we've had to focus our subject material a little bit and what we've done in doing that is we've taken a bit of a clue from the questions that many of the people that have registered for the webinar have put to us. So we're not going to talk about carbon footprints and mitigation matters very much, if at all. Those matters are quite significant and they deserve their own time.
We're going to be talking about climate change adaptation in the local government context. So the points that we will get to today, one is about encouraging the local government organisations to think longer term than the typical three to ten year period that they're often putting their policy documents out to communities on. We're going to be encouraging organisations, we're going to be talking a bit about the assumptions that should be part of that longer term outlook and we're also going to be building a road to gradual adaptation as opposed to a shock.
So the country has seen major events, major weather events, those are shock events and we think climate change adaptation, the big thing around climate change adaptation is trying to steer away from having to manage through those shocks and put arrangements in place so that communities can cope. So first of all, now that we've set those boundaries, what are we talking about when we're talking about climate change, Dean? Climate change is long term shifts in temperature and weather patterns and what that means globally is that the atmosphere and the oceans are warming, ice and snow are diminishing and the sea level is rising. In Australasia, it appears we're going to experience higher surface air and sea temperatures, more hot extremes, fewer cold extremes and changes to rainfall patterns.
In New Zealand, there's expected to be regional variation in the long term shifts in weather patterns. For example, we're probably going to see less rain in the northeast South Island and the north and east of the North Island, but more rain elsewhere. There's one way to think about the impacts of climate change is in terms of slow onset events and rapid onset events and that's Adolf's area of knowledge really.
Yeah, it's an interesting question actually because we think of the slow onset events like gradual sea level rise as both rapid onset events, the kind of storms that we've seen and things like fires as well, but the two are actually interrelated because as the sea level rises, the risks, the damage that can be done by the extreme events is exacerbated and we've got a little clip here that we can show you what happened in Hawke's Bay a few years ago. So yeah, you can see what's happened there. Those massive big waves have actually been occurring in Hawke's Bay really since the 1960s, if not earlier, but they've become more frequent and there used to be a couple of dunes of stones there.
They've all gone and a lot of that's been exacerbated in the last few years and we can expect to see that go up, increase a lot more and you'll see in the clip there, the waves crashing over the houses. Some of those seawalls are now gone. So as the sea rises, those events, as I said, become more damaging.
Yeah, and I think one of the key points of that really is seeing the changes in temperature and weather patterns are risk exacerbators. If you look at Cyclone Gabriel, for example, the cyclone itself wasn't caused by climate change, but the preliminary modelling indicates that climate change did increase the level of rainfall that occurred during the cyclone by about 20-30%. And even then, that level of increased rainfall wasn't necessarily the cause of harm, rather it was that level of rainfall in the context of a whole lot of other circumstances and different things like soil erosion, susceptibility, land use decisions.
Yeah, so that's sort of... Forestry slash? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and then also another big part of that is, of course, infrastructure design and that's something that councils have... There's quite a lot of interest to councils, we've heard.
Thanks for that. Jess, what do we mean when we're talking about infrastructure? Thanks, Wayne. When we're talking about infrastructure in the context of today's discussion, we're really talking about the physical assets that councils own, such as those that provide water, our sewerage and stormwater systems, our roads, our public facilities that provide public services.
And I think Local Government NZ has estimated that the value of these physical assets that local government own is about $124 billion. So that's kind of giving you a sense of the scale of the cost of these assets and it makes it really critical that we're talking about climate change adaptation and how local government can respond. So what are councils doing to manage the risk? Yes, one of the things is essentially forming community panels to then decide what the risks are, what's to be protected.
And it's not just, as Jess was saying, there's physical infrastructure, but there's also natural assets like wetlands and access to the beach. So these things have to be sorted out by the councils and the community groups before they can even start planning about what kind of defences to do. And I'll come back to that later on.
So when it comes to the council's role, often we know that councils are big on plans and doing plans for their communities, strategies and the like. Adolph, can you tell us a wee bit about adaptation planning? Yes, it's basically what I was mentioning. It needs to get the community on board, otherwise you get dictated to, we will do this, we'll build a seawall there, we'll take that road out here.
So in all the ones I've been involved with, there's half a dozen or so, there's always been panels normally around the size of a dozen or so people drawn from business, from tangata whenua and from households to try and sort out what it is that the priorities are and what risks they face before you get into the planning side of things. Do we have the right regulatory tools to respond to change? Well, do we want to talk about the Climate Change Adaptation Act before we get into that now or later on? The regulatory tools are not really there. For example, it's unclear whether councils can acquire land that will be affected by climate change under the Public Works Act.
And you might recall the situation in Northern Bay of Plenty where there was a huge kerfuffle over buyouts and people not wanting to go. So that's unclear. There's unclear about whether there are the right controls, strict planning controls.
Can you put more houses into areas that are exposed? And even if that was settled, what about areas that may not be immediately exposed but are exposed many years hence? So that again needs to be sorted out. And of course, when it comes to funding, which we might talk about later, there's even less guidance. Just while we're on that, Adolph, I know we've worked together on a couple of things.
It's not a regulatory tool necessarily, but are there other modelling tools? I know one that we've talked about is Dynamic Adaptive Housing Planning. Yeah, I'd like to talk a bit about that. And that's been used very much in Hawke's Bay and a couple of locations in Wellington and Westport, also in Thames.
And Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning is essentially about making a decision to invest in strategies that are not irreversible or very expensive to reverse. So in order to do that, as I said before, one first of all has to decide what are the risks that each area faces? Is it flooding from the river? Is it sea level rise? Is it fire, as might be the case in some parts in the South Island? Then what's important, the various assets that Jess talked about, the non-built-up assets. Then you can talk about generic options before you get into actually doing the economic analysis.
And in doing that, one goes to the Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning issue, which means one can invest in something that doesn't preclude doing something else later on. And I can talk a bit more about, should we talk about real options analysis, Wayne? Can we do that here? Why not? Real options analysis is an interesting term. It's just a fancy term for cost-benefit analysis, really, that takes into account the value of waiting.
So essentially there's a trade-off here. Do we want to spend a lot of money too soon? And that may turn out to be, if the climate change hazard is less serious than initially anticipated. Of course, the other side of that is if you delay doing something, you may get wiped out.
So the question that real options analysis tells us, or the guidance that it gives us, is what is the value of waiting? And we have to try and trade off those two type 1 and type 2 error type effects. So when is it worthwhile doing something? And when is it better than doing nothing? And if you've got more than one option, what is the best option out of all the ones you've got? And what is the trade-off between cost and flexibility? We can have a least cost option, but it might be something that has no flexibility at all, and in times of uncertainty as we have now, we don't know what the climate change pattern is actually going to be like. You want to keep that flexibility there.
So again, there are trade-offs there. I should add that real options analysis, although it's an economic way of looking at things, it's not the be-all and end-all. It's hard to take into account non-economic values.
What's the value of a cultural asset, for example? One can take that into account using multi-criteria analysis, which I'm sure my colleagues here have done a lot of as well. But that all comes back then to going back to the panels and saying, well, the real options analysis shows you that options A and B look quite good. But on the other hand, the community may say, well, we don't like those options because they restrict our access to the beach, or there's an ugly seawall which takes out the view.
Why would we live here anymore? So that's why you need the community participation to give you that kind of overall view as to what's viable to the community and what isn't. Sorry, I'll just ask one quick follow-up out of personal interest. Do you think it's useful to do community engagement before you undertake those sort of exercises? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I think you do. You've got to work out the risks. What's the nature of the risk? What's the assets that are being protected? And then what are the kind of adaptation actions that are acceptable to the community? And that may take a bit of persuading as well, of course, because one of those actions might be managed retreat, and nobody seems to like that for understandable reasons.
Some communities are already doing that, and there's nothing like a sudden onset event to persuade people that perhaps this isn't a good place to live. One of the questions that has come up, and we've started addressing it, is what regulatory tools are available to councils? And before the webinar got started, we were talking about new legislation that might be in the wings as well. Adolph, can you tell us a wee bit more about that? Yeah, there's a little... We have the Climate Change Adaptation Bill, eventually an Act, which my understanding is was supposed to be introduced to Parliament before the election.
It now looks like it won't be introduced until well into next year, and with a change of government, who knows where that will go. The Environmental Defence Society has been doing a lot of research on that and have released quite a few papers on it. There's nothing concrete, as you might expect at this stage, but they have got a whole lot of issues to consider.
One of the ones is, as we said before, about whether local councils have the right legislation to force people to sell compulsory buyout under the Public Works Act. They've got to look at that. And you'll have seen in the case of the rainfalls in Auckland and Hawke's Bay, if you compensate people, what do you base it on? Is it the replacement cost of the asset? Is it the market value before the event or after the event? How do you measure it? Is it the cost of building a replacement elsewhere on a different location, which may require a whole new subdivision a few miles away? There's nothing on governance structures for these things, for dealing with things like managed retreat and general adaptation actions.
No clear rules. And funding, of course. Well, are we going to talk about funding? We'll do that later on.
We will get to that. All right, I'll come back to funding later. Yep, we definitely will touch on that.
But something we touched on just a moment ago was about engagement in climate change adaptation planning. Jess, how does community engagement fit into adaptation planning? I guess community engagement is really critical to adaptation planning, especially from the local government's point of view. There are a couple of ways that we can think about engagement and climate change adaptation planning.
The first type of engagement really relates to responding to the community's reactions to climate change engagement. We know within communities there are often some people who are really concerned about the climate and really want to know what the council is doing and if it's taking long-term action to address climate change and the kind of impacts that they're likely to feel. That's one aspect that the council really needs to respond to those people in the community and demonstrate that it is thinking long-term.
There's another side to the community which perhaps consists of people who aren't as concerned about climate change but they really need to understand from the council's point of view that there will be costs in terms of this long-term planning. There will be costs that will fall on these people. So there's kind of these two aspects that councils need to engage with in communities.
And another way to think about community engagement is thinking about the value that communities can actually bring to the table in terms of making decisions, in terms of talking about the impacts that they are feeling currently or they think that they will feel. Local history. Local history, exactly.
They know these things quite well. And in some cases there's members within communities who've already really thought about what are the solutions that I'm going to take on my property or in my area. And so really trying to build on what people are already doing is something I think that is important and kind of really should be given value.
And just to really reiterate what Adolph and Sean said, starting engagement with the community before you think you need to is really valuable. And of course this has to be balanced with prioritisation and resourcing capacity, etc. But it's obviously much better practise to engage beforehand and not in response to an extreme event, as we've talked about.
And it's really important to bring communities on a journey and bring in their ideas and input early because I think, as I said, they might already have solutions to some of these issues that you're facing. There is, can I just add, the coordination aspect of this. I know one case where someone built a seawall in front of their property.
This wasn't part of any wider action that the council was doing. And so it protected their property. But what happened, of course, is the sea and the waves came around on each side and produced more damage to the neighbouring properties.
So you definitely need to get that whole community buy-in before someone acts unilaterally and does something which really has adverse consequences elsewhere. And I'll just add a couple of things to what Jess said. And that's the first one, I think, is sort of a combination of what Jess said and what Adolf was talking about, which is it might look like community engagement is sort of expensive, but actually it could end up saving you money if you start doing that early.
Because if you're thinking about dynamic adaptive pathways planning or something like that, if you know what to take off the table initially because there just isn't support for it, then you can see how that's going to bring down the cost to the council of the overall process. And then the other thing I'll say is that starting engagement really early can help to sort of bring the people in Jess's second group of citizens along. And one way that we really like to do that is by trying to get a recognised climate science expert into the room quite regularly and quite early with communities to give them confidence that the council has got the best advice and understands the impacts for the region.
Yeah, and so I think that just sets a really good sort of basis to get people thinking about both what the impacts are going to be and what might be needed to respond to those. So what I'm hearing from all of that is that the council is acting as a facilitator, doesn't need to have all the answers, brings evidence-based information to the community to sift through and work through. And the other way.
Absolutely, absolutely. But related to that is a change in mindset. How can a council get its communities to think long-term? That's a real shift.
Yeah, I think really just building on what Sean has said, I think getting that information in front of people early and having the data that they can see this is actually going to happen or this is likely to happen to us is really important. And establishing that and sharing and establishing long-term assumptions with the communities I think is something that you can do to try and get them to think long-term. And as well, as you said, Wayne, obviously the facilitator role is something that we think, and from our experience, is a really effective way that the councils can get the communities to really think about their own physical assets, but also their social and cultural well-being as well, kind of really get a bit of a mind shift change to think about those other aspects, not just about their physical assets.
But again, all of this that I'm saying is really from a risk perspective, and I think there's other ways that we can think of it as well, and opportunities is one thing that Sean and I have talked about. Yeah, yeah, and I mean this sort of, I don't know, vaguely blasphemous I suppose, but I think a lot of the narrative around climate change adaptation is squarely focused on those changes in temperature and weather patterns as risk exacerbators. But I do think that at least when we're trying to get communities to think long-term, you can look at them as sort of opportunity generators as well, because you are sort of, like taking changes in weather and temperature over the medium to long-term, there's already good evidence coming out of New Zealand from different regions showing that we're going to be able to grow new crops in new regions.
Where you previously couldn't, and even going to be able to grow whole new crops in New Zealand that you couldn't previously grow in New Zealand. And I think sort of, I don't know, personal experience tells me that people are probably more motivated to work towards opportunities than necessarily working against risks. And so I think if you are doing community engagement, then if you just shift your focus a wee bit into looking, okay, what are some opportunities that we could look at with the community here around this? And you might find that that encourages more medium to long-term thinking from your communities, when they can see that there might actually be a benefit for them down the road to work towards.
And you'll probably end up addressing the same risks that you would have addressed anyway. So it's just a little bit of a reframing, I think, that might be helpful. And unfortunately, possibly helped by an adverse event.
Something horrible to make people think, well, actually, what are we going to do to stop this happening in the future? So you need a combination of, well, unfortunately, some adverse events and then the view that you're talking about. So when we were talking about adaptation planning before, what are some of the examples of how councils can engage with their communities on this? Yeah, so there's a whole range of examples. It really depends on the purpose of the engagement, because I guess some councils and communities will be at the very start of their journey, right? And so in those particular instances, a potential in-person meeting with some of the affected communities or the communities that may be affected first, depending on some of the kind of impacts modelling, they could be engaged first in a sort of an in-person event or meeting.
And for those councils that maybe have limited resource or capacity, they could potentially do a Q&A document or some sort of online webinar like we're doing today, which doesn't require too much. And as I said, it's really important to bring people on the journey. So getting these kind of introductory events before you go into the dynamic adaptive pathways planning is really important.
For those who are kind of maybe a bit more down the road, other forms of engagement include self-focus groups or crowdsourcing. As I said, you really want to look at the communities to get ideas from them as to what are some of the actions, what are some of the impacts, and what's actually being felt by communities currently. And I really think that that sort of approach could help with decision-making for the council.
And I guess the other thing is that it's a little bit away from BAU engagement where you're engaging on specific issues at a point in time. This is a very long, as we've talked about, a very long-term planning sort of engagement. And so building relationships that you can kind of come back to, you know, again, every few years and, you know, have adaptive changes to the plans is really, really important.
And Adolf, you've got some experience with panels. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, in my experience when panels are being put together, Hawke's Bay had two panels, one for the southern part of the coast south of Napier and another part for the northern part, each with about a dozen or so people. Talking about resources, I don't think, and someone can correct me on this, that people didn't get paid to be on these panels.
The council would reimburse costs because some people would come from, you know, a little bit out of town and needed some transport costs and they probably got lunch and this sort of thing. But they didn't get paid because people had a stake in the game. It's good in the game.
So, you know, they were happy to do that. And the panels that Hawke's Bay set up started early on and they are still going, I think. So for a very long time, the initial work that we did on real options analysis was in 2017, and there are still decisions being made that haven't been finalised.
So, you know, the people on the panels and the expert technical advisory group come together quite a lot to see what progress has been made and what to do next. And I think with engagement, especially around something like this, if you're engaging, you might be engaging directly with one person, but they're going out and they've got a whole web of relationships that they are going to disseminate your messages through. So I think, yeah, you can really effectively reach a much larger group of people than you think you might be.
Yeah, that was just the one thing I sort of wanted to add to that. Thanks for that. Well, to wrap up this segment, can each of you just give me one thing that local councils should consider when they're planning community engagement on climate change adaptation? I can go first.
I think the main thing, I've kind of mentioned this already, is that councils don't need to have all the answers. And the example that Adolph just gave is really beautiful, that there's already people who are really kind of passionate and engaged in this who want to be involved. So really relying on those types of people and looking to the communities to support the council coming up with plans for adaptation is really important.
And I think it doesn't only build relationships within the community, but it makes people feel really heard, respected, and sort of builds a common sense of objectives amongst the community. And again, and then if you do that, you can make sure that the risks are identified, the adaptation strategies are sorted out, and you don't suddenly jump off and invest in stuff that might turn out to be a bad decision. So take your time.
Okay, there are adverse events which could happen at any point, but things like sea level rise are long-term effects. We don't want to act too rashly. I'm sorry, I'll give my one tip as well.
So I think my one would be start engaging about this now. Like the earlier you start, and especially if you're seeing your engagement as just a way to build relationships with the community and to sort of provide them the information that they need to make good decisions and to get the information from them that you need, there's no too early. Like we've said, you don't need to have all the answers by the time you start your engagement.
In fact, you probably shouldn't, I would say. No, well, that's right. Start the engagement early, but take your time about considering what actually to do to use actual adaptation action.
And I think just one other thing to add, I think I alluded to it earlier, but the value of that type of engagement is something that can be applied to other areas that the Council is trying to engage with people on. So I guess something would be to think about it, and just wider than climate change adaptation, there is a lot of value in building those relationships if you want to engage with these communities on other aspects. Right, well, thanks everybody for your insights today.
We've got a few questions that have come through from people that are registered outside of some of the stuff that we've already touched on. And the first one I'm going to go to is one from Rob Dunn of Kapiti Coast District Council. Rob asks, how to achieve effective community engagement over complex climate-related issues when resources to deliver and political leadership to prioritise are not available? I will grab that one, please.
Yes, I think we need to think about what we mean by effective here. Because as we've discussed, climate change and climate change adaptation require thinking over longer timeframes than we generally tend to. So in that sort of context, I think engagement can be effective in the sense of beginning to gradually build grassroots support for political leadership to prioritise climate adaptation.
And then I think once you... Because if we're thinking 50 years plus here, then 10 years is a long time, even in that sort of context of starting to build up the willingness amongst communities to support political leaders who are willing to make the changes that need to be made. And then I think funding will sort of come after that. I know it's probably not the answer you might have necessarily wanted to hear, but it might be a bit of a hard sell.
But I do think it is true that effective here can just be a very gradual shift in what the ratepayers think about an issue. I think there's actually a real appetite in communities for councillors to, as we started talking about before, facilitate the conversation. So I actually don't think it's that difficult to get the ball rolling.
It's when you actually start translating that into realistic and achievable solutions, I suppose. And the finance. Yeah, we're going to get to that.
Yeah, and I think just to add to what Sean was saying, to kind of echo what I said earlier, is that thinking about these engagements outside the climate change adaptation engagement only, you're thinking about the value of building these relationships and that might bring maybe some of the others within the local government on board in terms of the value of this engagement. OK, thanks for all of that. There's something that a number of people have raised when they're registering for the webinar, a particular question about engaging with Maori communities.
What are the key things to consider when engaging with Maori? Yeah, I'll take this one. I think I'll preface all of what I'm about to say by saying that Maori, both individuals and communities, are hugely diverse in terms of their circumstances and beliefs. So yeah, but I do think there are still sort of some helpful general points to make here.
I think the starting point and speaking to a local government audience is probably preaching to the choir a wee bit, but if council already has a good trusting existing relationship with mana whenua in particular, then engaging with them about climate adaptation is going to be relatively easy because it's just another set of sort of problems and I'll throw the opportunities thing in there again, opportunities that you're working together to try and take advantage of. If for whatever reason a council doesn't have a good relationship with mana whenua, then I do think that climate adaptation is probably one of the best sort of things to start building that relationship on because you've got a completely shared sort of set of outcomes that everyone wants the same. And it's taking a long-term view and so it's a really good chance to start building a good relationship with mana whenua and so I've talked about mana whenua and then engaging with sort of Māori generally.
A colleague once told me that her aim in life was to be a good tūpuna or ancestor and I think that's a very good way to frame engagement about climate adaptation for anyone but particularly for Māori and I think if a council's going to whānau, hapū or iwi and saying what do we need to do or how can we work together to be good ancestors, then yeah, I just think that's an excellent framing because straight away it's put you into thinking about the type of timeframes that you have to think about when you're thinking about climate adaptation which is sort of the 50-year time horizon at least, exactly. Yes, I think, yeah. Yes, we're doing some analysis now that looks out to the year 2150, 2150.
Exactly, and that's, I mean, ideally that's probably the way that a lot of planning is going to go with everything but yeah, for this one in particular it's excellent. So Peter Clough, he asks climate impacts don't adhere to administrative boundaries so how are councils to coordinate impact mitigation to greatest effect? And I'll start on this one because as many of the people who are watching today know many, many council activities operate across district council or territorial local authority and regional council boundaries so that's not really a foreign concept to councils in Wellington for example waste and wastewater services operate between Wellington and Porirua it's just an example. So does anyone else on the panel have anything to add? Well, one could add that it's not just across councils it's also across institutions because the example of the replacement for the Melling Bridge and the enlarged stop banks on the Hutt River involves NZTA as well and railways because the railway station has to be moved the bridge interacts with State Highway 2 so you've got the Wellington Regional Council Hutt City, NZTA and railways and a few other parties all involved in it so it's cooperation across institutions and cooperation across space as well and in Hawke's Bay, another example that follows on from your one, Wayne is the Hawke's Bay Regional Council Napier City Council and Hastings District Council all working together on protection against climate change risk as well Yeah, I think the councils would have a lot of sense it makes a lot of sense to talk to your neighbours on anything and you share the burden a lot as you do that David Watson from Palmerston North City Council asks a question, how can councils fund so this is the one we've kind of been getting to he asks, how does the councils fund the scale of work required to reach even 1 in 50 year event capacity so one of the issues around this question is when you talk about a 1 in 50 year event you're talking about this thing we're trying to try and not get ourselves caught up in which is a sudden event and councils infrastructure and those sorts of things are designed to a certain capacity and I would say that as you look to climate change adaptation you'd look at the asset management plan and ask yourself, is this the right level of service is this configured for the future as opposed to what we currently cope with but that's a slightly different thing from responding to an event, that's that adaptation thing I think the point that might be relevant here is that the 1 in 50 year event can be handled by insurance because it is rare but over time as climate change is exacerbated that event will become more frequent and or more intense and at that point the insurance industry at some point says well we've paid you out 2 or 3 times sir we're out of here and then there's the question of okay, what happens after that and we can see again in the case of Hawke's Bay where the councils are attempting to come up with a funding model where essentially if it's private property that's being protected those people pay more of the costs of the adaptation action if it's public property like a road or a beach it becomes paid for by the wider community but at the moment and the Climate Change Adaptation Act will hopefully deal with this at some point there's no legal framework that links adaptation planning to funding so councils are doing the best they can and it gets rapidly into the wider question of how you fund local government because it's not just climate change as we know in Wellington it's a lot of broken pipes and a few vanity projects as well perhaps so these things are not very easy Yeah, if you were building up a fund to replace an asset you would think of it in a depreciation term but that's not necessarily the case in this kind of conversation is it? No, that's right, you do need to think in the future what can we do to make that asset more robust and it's going to be a bigger investment than something that you did in the past which you financed just by depreciation as you say but ultimately when you're looking longer term and you think we've got these potentially legacy type issues confronting us then it'll help councils in terms of their budgeting process whether it's an LTP or whatever it might be to prioritise its limited resources when they understand yep we've definitely got to plan for this we've gone through a really good process to this point therefore this particular approach or solution will rise to the top and there may be a whole new different ways of delivering council services so at the moment we're all used to everything being reticulated but there may be communities where that becomes unviable and every section has to have its own composting system or wastewater disposal system and that may well be cheaper Thanks Right, so Leonie Walker asks around engaging communities which we've spent a lot of time talking about today do councils have the expertise to understand how to change behaviour? I think like my gut reaction is my gut reaction is probably yes because I think a lot of what councils do involves changing behaviour like yeah I mean one example would probably be like take recycling for example it wasn't that long ago that you actually there wasn't a whole lot of recycling going on but then councils sort of brought in kerbside recycling and now if you walk down pretty much any residential street just about anywhere you'll see that those bins are as full as the landfill bins and so I think in that context that sort of councils doing behaviour change work because what that involves is figuring out why aren't people doing the thing that we think they should be doing or that we want them to be doing, what's actually stopping them from doing that and what can we do as a council to remove that barrier and that's the behaviour change Wearing an economist hat the price incentive can be quite important and we know that where water is being charged for the consumption is lower and the same applies to rubbish Yeah and I think what I'm saying there is that sure that example might not be climate change adaptation but those skills and that way of thinking is clearly in council however I will take the chance to do a blatant pitch so excuse me for this but we're really lucky to have a guy called Griff Griffiths he's a sort of internationally recognised expert in human centred design which is sort of a methodology that can squarely sort of resolve those figure out what the issue is and what can be done to remove that barrier to get the behaviour change and I'll say from experience if you get him in even for a couple of weeks right at the start of your adaptation strategy thing just to work with your staff to sort of develop that strategy that is very good value for money and your staff will learn a huge amount and probably build confidence that they already pretty much know what to do and they can take that forwards through there so you excuse the blatant pitch Cool Manditha Jamuna asks how best can local government incorporate climate change measures into operation and maintenance of existing infrastructure and my thoughts when I was reading that question was I'd go back to the asset management plan most asset management plans for embedded infrastructure and even for some of the social infrastructure they often have a 50 plus year life outlook so if you start incorporating what you think the operating profile is going to be into the future then you're flagging what the funding requirements are to maintain or move to that level of service and then you use the standard tools and mechanisms that councils have through their annual plan, through their long term plan process or bespoke consultation to bring the community along with you so I think that's just bread and butter for local government it's also I think the role and responsibility of council officers to bring to the attention of council the operating cost for this thing or this asset or this service is currently this and when you add these new information inputs in which are evidence based then it moves to this and then as you go through that process and we talked about adaptation planning as well you'll be working through a process where you'll know whether it's right for your community whether it has that flexibility that was touched on before as well and it's going to be fairly dynamic and some people are going to have difficulties processing that information but it is the role of local government to facilitate that I mean it might be things like increasing the size of the waste water pipes when you actually put these things in the ground or renew them making sure that your pumping station is a metre or so above where you might otherwise have put it because of the rising water table these things that aren't particularly costly if you do them at the start as you say Wayne part of that asset planning and getting the robustness in there Thanks Georgia Kahan asks how to avoid consultation fatigue we've talked about consultation a lot this is a question that I encounter quite a bit so it's a really good question how to avoid consultation fatigue are there any opportunities to consolidate with other local government engagement processes such as LTPs any thoughts on that team I guess it goes back to trying to really use any engagement in the most valuable way in the most effective way so really thinking about if you're engaging with a group can you engage with them on a few different things at once I'm not totally across the local government architecture and how that actually works but I think that's just a really simple thing to kind of change the mindset to not think about we have to engage them on this and then this, it's actually like we're just going to build a relationship with them and we can engage with them on all of these different issues and Sean you mentioned before in terms of talking to Maori in my experience I've been in this position a number of times when you're talking with Maori, they actually want to talk about everything so you've got a receptive dynamic going on in that case and I think Georgia you've actually touched on it there as well you do use the schedule processes councils when they're doing their work programmes, they'll be looking at the policies and other activities that are coming up and that's where you can look at is this topic relevant to these other things that we're going to be talking to people about so it makes a lot of sense it goes back to Sean's earlier point too these things are risk exacerbators there's no reason why when we're doing LTPs that these things can't come into the decision making process because the risks are there they're just different and exacerbated and I'll just add to that if you are finding consultation because we do quite a lot of engagement here if you are finding consultation fatigue it's usually just going to be with a subset of the stakeholders that you're engaging with and that in and of itself can be an indication that maybe you need to consider broadening who you're engaging with and so in that way it can almost you can look at it slightly positively I suppose and think oh that's a good reminder that actually maybe we're just talking to the same people over and over again and maybe we need to go out and actively look for some other people that we might not necessarily think we can talk to and sometimes that also is a bit of a push to put in that little bit more effort and engage with some people that are more difficult to engage with for whatever reason and those engagements can be extremely valuable if you start going to people that other people aren't engaging with I think one other thing just from our experience with consultation is changing the way that you do consultation there's different ways to consult with different groups and I think not having the same kind of mode of engagement all the time can be really helpful and as Sean said if you're engaging with a different group really thinking about what's actually going to work for them is it a one hour meeting or is it a half day workshop is it a full workshop, is it something online on location, is it something that you want to host so really being aware of the different forms of engagement and taking advantage of those is something that you can do as well to avoid consultation fatigue I think it's a really big issue and so it's a very valid issue and you've got to look at the capacity of the council and the community as well so some things might have to go down be moved down there down the priority sheet Anyway we've pretty much come to the end of our time for the webinar today I just want to thank the panel for taking the time to think about this issue and come to the conversation and thank everybody that's dialled in for the webinar today and sending us your questions I hope everyone has found it helpful and useful and have something to think about after this Thank you
