Make Every Investment A Meaningful Step Towards A Sustainable Climate Future

Will experience and foresight prevail this time?

The Auckland rainfall event and Cyclone Gabrielle confirm we are in a new climate reality. All over the planet we are seeing the human footprint in our extreme events and rising seas — extreme heatwaves in the USA, multiyear drought in Europe, wildfires and floods in Australia, California and Chile, massive rainfall events across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

This week, a symposium in Wellington marks 10 years since New Zealand introduced adaptive pathways planning approaches for addressing the reality of climate change. This symposium is a collaboration between Deltares Institute (Netherlands) and the Climate Change Research Institute (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington), with support from the Deep South Challenge, Resilience to Nature’s Challenges and the Ministry for the Environment.

“Experience and foresight must prevail this time,” said Judy Lawrence of the Climate Change Research Institute. “Adaptation is a journey we need to take together, and we all have a role to play.”

Marjolijn Haasnoot, from Deltares and Utrecht University, and present in Wellington for the symposium, commented on the pathways approach that is increasingly being used in decision making: “A pathways-approach can help to break adaptation into manageable steps and keep us navigating the right track as the future unfolds. This helps accelerate appropriate climate action.”

Pathways planning leads to decisions that are flexible and that avoid negative long-term dependencies, such as large transition costs that will fall disproportionately on future generations and have irreversible impacts for nature and people. In other words, pathways planning reduces barriers to adjusting to the ever-changing and currently worsening climate reality.

At the symposium, practitioners and researchers have explored lessons learned over the last 10 years of research and practice in decision making under uncertainty. These learnings for sustainable recovery in the face of climate change can be applied immediately. They include:

· Avoid investments that lock in problems for the future in the same exposed places where damage has been or in places we expect it to be experienced.

· Embed risk assessment and uncertainty into design standards and guidance for decision making on adaptation, mitigation and development.

· Use water and soil characteristics to determine our spatial planning and enable just land use choices that reduce rather than embed risk, for example by allowing more room for rivers and flood ways.

· Use decision tools that are fit for purpose, and which consider increasing damage from ongoing climate changes that are costed appropriately.

Judy Lawrence continued, “Government can enable action through the National Adaptation Plan, but we will not achieve what is needed without all actors playing their part. We have different and complementary roles in the system. The first steps”, she concluded, “must enable us to build an adaptive, sustainable future that is more resilient than the present. While we need to continue to learn about the effectiveness and feasibility of adaptation, particularly in relation to extreme events, we have the knowledge to accelerate action now."

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