Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas
Until recently Waka Kotahi was not factoring climate change and the need for resilience into many of its transport projects, and is said to be swamped by the need to respond to crises.
In its National Resilience Programme Business Case, produced by Tonkin + Taylor and Tregaskis Brown in 2020, the agency was criticised for "disjointed and reactive decision-making" which had led to "suboptimal and inefficient investment choices and is hampering our ability to adapt".
The Business Case was commissioned by Waka Kotahi in 2019 because it wanted to better understand the impact of natural hazards, climate change and severe weather on the national roading network. Waka Kotahi says it is now using the findings and recommendations of the business case to prioritise resilience and climate change.
Alongside the 308-page report, an interactive map was produced showing the location of more than 350 current risks to the national transport network, 38 of which were deemed to be extreme.
The report, and the map, also looked ahead to 2050, identifying 90 extreme risks due to the increased severity of storms and rising sea levels.
It paints a palpable picture. Some of the extreme risks to the national roading network are not thought to be fixable, with any new engineering work pointless in the face of climate change.
The roads are ticking time bombs, with landslides, rock fall, coastal inundation and sea level rise, flooding, and earthquakes essentially guaranteed to take them out of action, leading to long-term outages.
The report found long-standing issues with how transport projects were funded. Resilience is usually not a priority.
"Design requirements do not adequately take into consideration long-term sea-level rise or other climate-change related scenarios," the report said.
"While the likelihood of hazards occurring are known (eg. risk of landslide) they are often deprioritised in favour of more immediate issues.
"It is difficult for a local authority to prioritise an investment to protect against an event that might happen at some stage in the future in the face of community pressure to fund something else, or to keep rates down.
"The consequence of this is that when an event does occur, preventative or mitigating measures are not in place, and yet more pressure is put on emergency funding."
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) told Waka Kotahi a barrier to the pursuit of resilience is the fact emergency management issues often require immediate corrective action.
"This action is understandable and needed but taking this approach means that land transport investment partners often focus on fixing the problems of the day and address the issues from the previous event as opposed to forecasting and considering future risks and taking action for the long term."
As a result of the failure to account for increasing hazards, the cost of emergency work is skyrocketing.
In 2014/15, emergency works spending by Waka Kotahi was $30 million, but by 2018/19 those costs were $72m.
"There is limited consideration of options that do not involve repairs and maintenance focused on maintaining the current land transport system.
"Taking an adaptive management approach may be appropriate including consideration of managing (rather than removing) risk or retreating from heavily impacted areas."
NEMA told the report's authors that "too often, agencies aim for the minimum acceptable standard at the lowest capital cost" when addressing resilience.
"Even where agencies and local authorities can clearly see that replacing like-for-like assets such as bridges and culverts, or even entire parts of a route, represent a poor investment due to the changing risk profile, improvements are often not sought - rather the effort goes into reinstatement or replacement with similar assets."
Case study
A case study provided for the report was that of State Highway 60 at Takaka Hill, in Tasman.
In February 2018, during Cyclone Gita, Takaka Hill Road was damaged when a box culvert at the base of the hill was overwhelmed by storm debris, with water overtopping the road.
The culvert was known to not comply with Transport Agency standards, and the resulting flooding damaged a neighbouring property.
As part of the repair process it was proposed that the culvert be brought up to standard by increasing its capacity and alignment, and involved realigning a stream and installing debris control structures.
The proposal was rejected because emergency funding only covered immediate road reinstatement, despite costs of about $20m to repair the route.
"The result of this is that a known weakness in the SH network is allowed to persist, even though repair and improvement works were being planned and undertaken at the same time to several other parts of the route in close proximity.
"With the increasing frequency of high-intensity storms expected as a result of climate change, and as a result of catchment damage from ex-tropical storm Cyclone Gita, it is likely that damage and resultant closures will be experienced in this location again in the foreseeable future."
Waka Kotahi was told failure to address resilience issues would expose New Zealanders to more frequent and more severe disruption.
"At a practical level this means that some communities would be isolated more often, and the impacts on social and economic wellbeing would increase.
"We would continue to make decisions that locate people and assets in areas that would be at risk, adding to the profile of cost as we seek to maintain and repair transport assets that are at increasing risk from hazards such as sea level rise.
"We would continue to screen out low frequency events with severe consequences, and so continue to get surprises, with significant consequences to the economy and our reputation.
"Our approach would be largely reactive via emergency response rather than addressing risks before they occur.
"Investment in reducing risk would be ad hoc and poorly targeted, based on incomplete information and inconsistent risk assessment and prioritization approaches."
We'll get to a point where we can't adapt - Genter
Green Party transport spokesperson Julie Anne Genter said the country needed to start planning for climate change, and if it did not, there would be a point when it could no longer adapt.
"I do think we are going to be facing some very hard decisions," Genter said.
"We need government to be working with local communities and councils to identify the transport solutions that are going to enable us to keep moving people and goods around our country without exacerbating climate change, and while adapting to the severe weather events we're already experiencing."
Tough conversations will be needed with certain communities, Genter said, with some places likely to be isolated as a result of climate change.
She believes with some road routes possibly having to close, it will bring new opportunities for the likes of coastal shipping and passenger ships, and integrating those routes with road and rail routes.
"There's an opportunity to provide a more balanced transport system, but it does take that government leadership and funding to support the services.
"If someone were to propose putting on coastal shipping routes that were subsidised by the government, that might be less costly than repairing some of the roads that we need to build, and certainly less costly than all of the resource involved in moving goods by truck.
"But at the moment that's not really an option in our transport funding system. We need to think about this in a far more holistic way."
Julie Anne Genter. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
With some communities facing isolation, Genter said they can still be supported.
"The truth is that climate change is going to mean we have to change how we do things, and in some cases where we live and how we get around."
In some cases, we have to keep roads open - Brown
National Party transport spokesperson Simeon Brown said there are times when certain roading routes will have to be abandoned.
"When you think about major transport connections like the Manawatu Gorge where a decision had to be made about finding an alternate route, that was the right decision," Brown said.
"The public understand that, because it was a route that was constantly failing. These are decisions where the public and NZTA need to work together to make sure the right decisions are made for the long term."
But Brown said there are exceptions, such as routes along State Highway 1 that are critical for freight and public movement.
State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura is one such route with several extreme risks caused by landslides, earthquakes, sea level rise and other flooding.
In some cases, the report found a solution to those risks may not exist, and the road is already failing several times each year.
"It would be, quite frankly, irresponsible for a government to walk away from communities and walk away from incredibly important connections like that when they are taken out by a natural disaster," Brown said.
Simeon Brown. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
If some roads needed to be rebuilt every five years as climate change worsens, Brown said that would be a cost the country would have to wear.
"In some cases that will be the case. When you think of State Highway 1 which is the lifeline of the New Zealand economy, it's critically important that we can move goods and people around our country.
"These are decisions where, when you do rebuild you have to build to a more resilient standard, and that is what happened post [the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake], but that doesn't mean there aren't risks for the future.
"A government has to be prepared to respond to those risks."
'We will maximise resilience'
Transport Minister Michael Wood said the government will prioritise resilience in the road and rail networks.
Just this week, the government earmarked $275m of emergency funding topping up the National Land Transport Fund to pay for immediate response and recovery costs for roads hit by Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods.
Wood said it was just the start.
"New Zealand relies on a resilient transport network to provide vital connections between and within regions, particularly in the face of climate change and as we see severe weather events become more frequent and more damaging.
"Over and above recent announcements on funding for the immediate repairs needed to repair damage from Cyclone Gabrielle, the government is prioritising investment in strengthening our road and rail networks.
"We will be carefully working through a plan with affected regions to ensure that we are building back to maximise resilience for local communities.
"An example of this is our decision to rebuild SH25A as a bridge, which will make the route more resilient against the risks that caused the previous road to wash out."
Wood wouldn't discuss further funding in the Budget for transport resilience.
However, he said the government's "investment will provide New Zealanders with certainty that we are taking action now to ensure a resilient transport network for the future".
In the time since the business case was published in June 2020, Waka Kotahi has developed a long-term plan for adapting the land transport system to climate change and has already started to integrate more resilience work into its projects
However, with limited funding, there was a fine balancing act and there are still projects that were not as future-proofed as they might be.