The Government has told local councils they will have to plan decades ahead for floods, coastal erosion and rising seas, but it has pushed the hardest question of all, who pays, into the next term of Parliament.
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts introduced the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill on Wednesday. For the first time councils will be required by law to plan how high-risk communities will prepare for the impacts of climate change, Watts said. The plans would have to cover at least 30 years and, in the minister’s words, set out “the sequence of actions and investment needed to manage climate-driven natural hazard risks over time”.
Under the bill, regional councils would identify the priority areas through spatial planning, and city and district councils would draw up the detailed adaptation plans. Those plans would have to spell out work programmes, the triggers that set actions in motion, and cost estimates. The highest-priority areas would need plans within five years of a regional spatial plan being adopted, the rest within ten years, with reviews every decade, RNZ reported.
For communities living behind ageing stopbanks or on low-lying coast, that is a big shift. It formally puts on the table the prospect of managed retreat, the planned and staged withdrawal of people and buildings from places that can no longer be defended. South Dunedin, much of which sits barely above the water table, has already been described in official work as potentially indefensible within a 30-year horizon. The bill would force councils to say out loud what they intend to do about places like it.
The catch is money. The bill requires councils to work out what adaptation will cost, but it does not say who will foot the bill. Watts confirmed the Government has not settled the funding split. He said decisions about cost-sharing would be made in the next term of government, and that ministers were “simply not at that point” on who should pay. “The first step is get the plans in place,” he told RNZ. He acknowledged the scale of the question that remains. “Everyone is aware that, how do you fund this and who pays, are the two most complex and politically charged and challenging areas,” he said.
That leaves councils carrying the planning obligation without a matching cheque. Watts tried to steer them away from spending too freely, warning against “unnecessary gold-plating” and urging them not to plan around the most extreme climate scenarios. “Councils should plan for climate risks, but they must also plan for affordability,” he said.
Local Government New Zealand has been making the opposite point for months. Its president, Rehette Stoltz, has argued that councils are being asked to carry a national problem on local balance sheets and need “durable co-funding” from central government rather than another unfunded job handed down from Wellington. Ratepayers in small councils with big coastlines would struggle to fund buyouts or sea walls on their own, and the fear is that the households most exposed to hazards are often the least able to pay to move.
Independent work commissioned during the previous adaptation review recommended a dedicated central government fund to help pay for managed retreat, so that the burden did not fall unevenly across the country, and it suggested local government should not be left to fund retreat alone. The bill introduced this week does not create such a fund. It sets up the planning machinery and leaves the financing to be argued over after the election.
The Green Party says that is the whole problem. It has criticised the Government for spending close to three years working on adaptation only to produce a bill it says is silent on the reality of paying for climate response, and it warns that councils cannot keep absorbing new mandates without money attached.
The bill also carries a second, quite separate set of changes aimed at the Emissions Trading Scheme. It would strengthen governance of the scheme’s secondary market, bring in market conduct rules that prohibit price manipulation and misleading behaviour, and let monitoring agencies demand information from participants. It would also open a future route for new types of carbon removals or new emissions sources to be added to the scheme, though the Government has been explicit that agriculture is not among them.
None of this is likely to become law before New Zealanders vote. Watts confirmed the bill will not pass this term, noting that with Parliament rising on 24 September it simply runs out of runway before the election. That turns the legislation into as much an election marker as a piece of law, a statement of where the current Government stands on climate adaptation and a bill the next Parliament will inherit and can rewrite. Voters trying to work out where the parties actually stand on climate risk and who should pay for it can compare the policies with Newswire’s voting tool.
What the bill does settle, if it survives, is that councils can no longer avoid the conversation. They will have to map the risk, name the communities in the firing line, and put a price on protecting or moving them. What it leaves unsettled is the part that matters most to the people who live there, which is whether the country will share that cost or leave it stuck to a local rates bill.
What do you think, should central government commit to helping pay for managed retreat, or is climate adaptation a local responsibility? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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