The 2023 north island weather events (including the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle) are estimated to have caused between $9 billion and $14.5 billion in damage to physical assets. They also set new benchmarks for the costliest weather events ever in New Zealand for insurers.

Just some of the sobering statistics marshalled in a July report by an independent reference group set up by the Ministry for the Environment to help the government shape climate adaptation legislation. In its report, A proposed approach for New Zealand’s adaptation framework, the advisory group said $4.1 billion in “household assets” could face serious harm over the next 30 years.

The figure is based on modelling from consultancy Climate Sigma’s 2025 report, which estimated that between 2200 and 14,500 flood-prone residential properties, worth between $1.8 billion and $12.9 billion, could expect to be damaged by at least one extreme inundation or flooding event between 2026 and 2060.

“Central government is not liable for these losses, but faces growing public expectation to cover them, given New Zealand’s recent history of ad-hoc buy-outs,” says the report. An example of such an ad-hoc buy-out is the decision by the Government and Auckland Council a few months after the Auckland floods to provide $750 million each, a total of $1.5 billion, to buy out 600 houses. Since then, the number of home-owners who faced ongoing “intolerable risk to life” has increased to 1200, bringing the total cost of buy-outs to more than $2 billion.

If the advisory group’s recommendations are adopted, such acts of compassion for home-owners who have lost everything as a result of weather events will soon become a thing of the past. In the face of increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events, the advisory group recommends that, following a 20-year transition period, there should be no more buy-outs.

The group has also recommended that individuals should be responsible for knowing the risks and making their own decisions about whether or not to move away from high-risk areas. “New Zealanders need to have fair warning about the way natural hazards could affect them, so they can make informed decisions,” says the report. Getting fair warning means:

• Quality and timely information about the level of exposure to natural hazards is readily available.

• Anyone making decisions or participating in the market has access to the same information.

• People know what is being done to adapt to or manage risk and what this will mean for them financially (for example, what will they be required to pay for).

Great. You’re on your own. And if you are a climate-change denier? Or just plain stubborn? Tough.

Victoria University of Wellington emeritus professor Jonathan Boston, who was part of a previous expert working group on climate adaptation, was among a chorus of voices highly critical of the proposed approach. “One of the core responsibilities of any government is to protect its citizens and to deal with natural disasters and so on. That is above almost anything else,” he told The Otago Daily Times. To apply an end-date was “morally bankrupt and highly undesirable”.

Boston also pointed out that the report wrongly assumed that people would act rationally if they were properly informed of the risks. “We know from vast amounts of literature that people suffer from all kinds of cognitive biases… and that these have a profound influence on whether people make sensible decisions or not,” said Boston. “And quite apart from cognitive bias, lots of people lack choices. They lack the [financial] resources to make good decisions.”

It seems councils also lack the resources to make good decisions. Since the devastating one-in-200-year floods of 2023, Auckland Council has continued to approve new builds (about 4000) in hazard zones. In June, the Council told The New Zealand Herald that 13.6 per cent of all building consents issued touched a natural hazard, such as flooding, erosion, subsidence or slippage. Why? Because, under Auckland’s current Unitary Plan, while Council can make stricter requirements for those wanting to build in flood plains, it can’t actually turn them down. It’s waiting on a national directive (apparently coming this year) to give councils a stronger mandate to turn down such consents. If councils, with all their expertise and knowledge, still can’t make informed decisions about flood risks, then what hope for the individual home-owner?

The advisory group also recommended that funding for adaptation measures, such as flood schemes, sea walls and blue-green infrastructure, should follow a “beneficiary pays” approach in most cases.

If this is all sounding a bit familiar — remember user pays from the Rogernomics era — that’s because it is. Please let’s not go down that path again. Handling the complexities of managed retreat in an equitable way, in the new reality of more-frequent extreme weather events, requires something more sophisticated than this. Stopping new building consents in known flood hazard areas would be a good place to start. But the report is right about the need for urgency. We don’t have time to be such slow learners.