New Zealand’s infrastructure is facing mounting pressure from a changing climate. More frequent floods, longer droughts, and rising seas. Building resilience isn’t just about recovering after disasters; it’s about anticipating and adapting to change so we can protect our communities, economy, and way of life for generations to come.
At the recent Building Nations Conference in Wellington, Rt Hon Dame Patsy Reddy, Chair of the Climate Change Commission, spoke about how New Zealand can move from strategy to action in climate adaptation, highlighting the governance, investment, and leadership needed to safeguard our communities and infrastructure.
The International Infrastructure Management Manual (IIMM 3.2) defines resilience as a core consideration in asset management, not just to avoid failure, but in anticipating stress, responding, and recovering over time. Yet, conventional planning frameworks are poorly suited to a dynamically changing climate. Climate risk is inherently uncertain, with compounding effects such as intensified floods, drought and sea-level rise. These complex risks require institutional and governance frameworks that evolve with changing conditions, not static planning methods that lock people and assets into areas of growing risk.
Unfortunately, most of New Zealand’s current decision-making frameworks treat climate risk as fixed. Time bound approaches, zoning, map lines, and static classifications provide a false sense of certainty, while exposure and vulnerability continue to shift. As a result, risk is being locked in rather than managed adaptively. The consequences are being revealed globally in deltas, low-lying areas, and coastal regions, and this will increasingly affect Aotearoa unless our planning systems evolve to anticipate and respond to change.
The infrastructure sector recognises that climate adaptation is not just a technical issue, but an institutional one. We need consistent national resilience standards, improved data stewardship, and clearer guidance for local government on assessing risk and balancing trade-offs. According to Lloyd’s of London, New Zealand is the second most at risk country in the world for natural hazards. Yet our recovery systems remain ad-hoc and inconsistent, hampered by fragmented guidance, inadequate data management, and limited frameworks for long-term decision-making under uncertainty.
This lack of clarity undermines investor confidence, and limits our ability to plan and build resilient infrastructure. Embedding resilience in infrastructure standards and asset policies must become the norm. To do that, New Zealand needs stronger system leadership on data collection, standard interoperability and capability building.
Good decisions depend on good information. The impacts of climate change will affect where we live, how we farm, where we invest, how we run our businesses, where we allow new development, and how we protect our communities.
To make sound choices, we need to be able to assess climate risk. Understand the degree to which we are exposed, sensitive, and able to respond to hazards. While a significant amount of climate data exists, it is fragmented, inconsistently managed, often hard to use.
The National Climate Change Risk Assessment (2020) highlighted that we have limited tools and guidance for making decisions under uncertainty, particularly those that consider change over long timeframes.
The Climate Change Adaptation Technical Working Group reinforced that, to adapt effectively, we must:
- be informed about how the climate is changing and what this means for us;
- have the right tools and frameworks; and
- take proactive, dynamic steps to reduce exposure and vulnerability.
It is encouraging that the New Zealand government plans to make the climate projections, hazard information, adaptation tools widely available. These resources should be embedded in standard asset management practice, rather than treated as add-ons. Local councils and infrastructure owners should expect, and demand, that these capabilities align with the IIMM’s approach, ensuring resilience is built into every asset planning and investment decision.
Climate adaptation is about more than infrastructure, it’s about people, livelihoods, and intergenerational wellbeing. The choices we make today about how we plan, invest, and manage our assets will define how resilient Aotearoa will be tomorrow. Building climate resilience into every infrastructure decision is the best investment we can make for the generations to come.
