By Steve Mooney
New Zealand’s urban future is arriving faster than our infrastructure can cope with. Intensifying housing, shifting mobility patterns, and harsher climate impacts are colliding with decades of underinvestment in maintenance and renewal.
The result is familiar: leaky pipes, outages, emergency works, and a growing backlog that constrains new projects. Government assessments are blunt – New Zealand ranks near the bottom of the OECD for public-sector asset management maturity. While capability programmes are underway, the scale of the challenge demands action beyond business-as-usual, especially as densification accelerates and climate risks rise across coastal and river cities.
The National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) embeds higher-density housing near centres and transit. This is good policy for affordability, emissions, and liveability but it concentrates demand on aging networks and compels smarter asset lifecycle strategies. Growth arrives on top of unresolved maintenance and condition data gaps. Asset managers must see this as both opportunity and pressure: opportunity to renew smarter and right-size service levels; pressure because the backlog is real and growing.
The National Adaptation Plan sets three imperatives: reduce vulnerability of exposed assets, ensure new infrastructure is climate-fit, and use renewals to improve adaptive capacity. Resilience cannot be an optional add-on, it must be baked into Treasury decisions and sector codes.
Infrastructure NZ warns that networks built for milder rainfall and lower extremes need capacity upgrades and greener, more permeable urban environments, such as rain gardens, swales, and sponge-city solutions, in order to handle heavier storms.
Coastal cities face a double bind: sea-level rise and the hidden response of shallow groundwater. Rising seas elevate groundwater tables, increasing flooding, corrosion risk, and interference with buried infrastructure often before overt inundation occurs. Councils must integrate groundwater data and hazard modelling into asset plans now to avoid costly surprises later.
The Infrastructure Commission’s “Taking Care of Tomorrow Today” report finds limited awareness of asset management fundamentals, low transparency around performance and funding, and a need to prioritise renewals over shiny new projects. Audit NZ echoes these concerns: weak detail on maintenance, poor cost estimates, and uncertainty about resourcing major programmes.
Both bodies prescribe the same cure: lift leadership, build workforce capability, publish clearer performance and investment data, and align to international best practice standards for asset management.
Population growth, severe weather events like Cyclone Gabrielle, and managed retreat pathways under the Climate Adaptation Act all demand a financing and governance model that moves money and partnerships to where adaptation is needed before failure forces emergency works at far higher cost.
As a result, we need to treat renewals as the primary climate adaptation tool. For every $40 spent on new infrastructure, invest $60 in maintenance and renewals. Embed low-carbon materials, flood-resilient design standards, and nature-based solutions into renewal specifications. Index condition monitoring to climate-exposed locations.
We should modernise asset information and make it transparent. In practice, this information would be more accessible for communities, improving data quality and integration, making performance and funding data publicly accessible, and engaging citizens on levels of service and trade-offs. It would also help to emphasise service outcomes like resilience, safety, reliability, and fit-for-purpose capacity. We should publish dashboards and long‑term funding intentions using predictive analytics for renewals and maintenance to make the recommendation more actionable.
Next, we should integrate urban planning and climate risk into business cases from day one. Transit‑oriented development, compact housing design form/patterns, walkable neighbourhoods, and active transport connections should be assessed alongside infrastructure renewals to capture co‑benefits: fewer vehicle trips, lower emissions, improved health outcomes, and more efficient network utilisation.
Most importantly, we need to invest in the people who manage the assets. Capability and capacity constraints are now the binding limits. Build the ‘community of practice’ the Government has called for a recruit of digital skills across central agencies, councils, and utilities and that enable predictive maintenance and scenario planning.
Lastly, we need to acknowledge coastal risk with facts and timing, not optimism. Monitor groundwater, map exposure, and sequence renewals, relocations, and protective works against realistic climate scenarios.
New Zealand can build the resilient, low‑carbon urban environments we aspire to. But we will not get there by piling new projects atop fragile systems. The next decade must be defined by disciplined asset management: renewals that adapt, data that informs, business cases that integrate urban form and climate risk, and a workforce empowered to deliver.
