New Zealand is spending almost all of its natural hazard money cleaning up after floods and storms rather than preventing the damage, according to the Climate Change Commission, which has told the Government that the country’s preparation for a warming climate is going too slowly to keep up with the risks.
The Commission released its second assessment of progress on the national adaptation plan on Tuesday. It found that natural hazards, including climate change, are costing central government and insurers more than $4 billion a year, and that figure covers only the direct costs. Of the money central government puts towards natural hazards, 97 percent goes on responding and recovering after the event. Three percent goes on reducing the risk of damage happening in the first place.
“Two years on, our second assessment finds progress in some areas, but overall action has been too slow, too uneven and too poorly coordinated,” Commission chief executive Jo Hendy said in the Commission’s statement.
Hendy said the blockages were largely a matter of unfinished decisions rather than a lack of ideas. “Delays in decisions about funding and cost-sharing, gaps in governance and coordination, and a lack of clear tools and processes in key areas are holding up action,” she said.
The assessment is a statutory job. Under the Climate Change Response Act, the Commission has to report on how the Government is tracking against the national adaptation plan, and its first report in 2024 set out a list of gaps. The 2026 assessment finds that many of those gaps are still open two years later, though it credits the Government with real progress in two places, the proposed new legal requirement for councils to do local adaptation planning, and moves to strengthen councils’ ability to manage natural hazard risk when they consider new development.
What is new this time is that the Commission has put names against the work. Because progress has been too slow, it identified six areas needing urgent action and set out which ministers are responsible for each of them. The six are establishing funding and financing pathways for local adaptation, requiring local adaptation planning, aligning the various pieces of legislation that touch on climate risk, maintaining national climate risk information, supporting MΔori-led adaptation, and strengthening the next national adaptation plan. The Minister of Climate Change carries the overall accountability, alongside the ministers of Finance and Local Government, the minister responsible for Resource Management Act reform, and ministers holding related portfolios including infrastructure and building.
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts rejected the idea that the Government has been standing still. “New Zealand is better prepared today than it was three years ago because this Government has moved from talking about adaptation to delivering it,” he told interest.co.nz. He said the focus was “on practical action to help communities prepare for the impacts of climate change while protecting taxpayers’ money”.
Labour’s climate change spokesperson Deborah Russell called the findings a concerning indictment of the Government’s lack of progress.
The report lands in the middle of an unresolved argument about money, and that argument is the reason the Commission keeps returning to funding. In July the Government introduced the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill, which for the first time would require councils to produce adaptation plans for high risk communities covering at least 30 years, with staged actions, cost estimates and triggers for when work needs to start. What the bill does not do is say who pays. Watts has said that decisions about cost-sharing between central government, councils, ratepayers and property owners would be made in the next term of government, describing them as among the most complex and politically charged questions in climate policy. Newswire covered that gap when the bill was introduced, in Government tells councils to plan 30 years ahead for climate risk but puts off deciding who pays.
That leaves councils holding the planning obligation and the cost estimates without a matching commitment from Wellington, which is the practical version of the problem the Commission describes. Local Government New Zealand has argued councils need durable co-funding from central government rather than carrying what it sees as a national problem on local balance sheets. The pressure is not spread evenly. A large city can absorb a seawall or a stormwater upgrade across a wide rating base. A small coastal district with a few thousand ratepayers and a low value rating base cannot, and it is those places where the bill for protection or relocation is largest relative to what the community can raise.
The scale of the exposure was set out by the Commission earlier this year in its 2026 national climate change risk assessment, which grouped the most significant risks under key infrastructure, communities and safety, nature and the bioeconomy, and decisions and funding. That assessment put more than 500,000 buildings and about $235 billion of value in areas exposed to inland flooding. Under the law the Minister of Climate Change now has two years to respond with a new national adaptation plan, which is due in 2028. On the current parliamentary timetable, the ministers who write it will be decided by voters on 7 November.
Hendy’s central argument is an economic one rather than an environmental one. The Commission says every dollar invested in reducing risk ahead of time can return up to ten dollars in avoided harm and avoided recovery spending, and that continuing to pay after the fact is becoming unsustainable as the losses mount. On its numbers, the country is currently doing the opposite by a ratio of about 32 to one.
Climate adaptation is likely to be one of the quieter arguments of the election campaign, and one of the more expensive ones to get wrong. If you are still deciding where you stand, our voting tool compares the parties’ policies.
What do you think? Should central government pick up more of the cost of protecting at risk communities, or should that sit with councils and property owners? Leave a comment below and tell us how this looks from where you live.
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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