I flew from climate devastation in Navajo Nation to relocation in East Cape. NZ needs five things now – Kiri Allan
Last week, I stood on the Navajo Nation while the San Juan River rose to a level that broke a record held since 1909. Communities were cut off and roads and infrastructure were destroyed. The elders I spoke to had never seen floods like it in the desert.
Driving from Flagstaff to Phoenix, I saw green shoots across country that rarely grows them. Years of drought bake the soil as hard as pavement, so rain runs off instead of soaking in. Drought and flood hit the same ground.
On the way home, I read about Papua New Guinea, where a crisis is unfolding right now. An El Niño drought is affecting as many as eight million people and some regions have had less than a quarter of their usual rainfall since August.
Rivers have dried up and food gardens have shrivelled. Families in Morobe province have no water to drink, cook or wash with and some clinics have stopped taking inpatients because they have none. In the Highlands, women and girls walk three to four hours to find water and food. In Port Moresby, planned blackouts have started and could last up to 10 months. A coalition of churches, unions and business groups calls it a national crisis with no co-ordinated plan to protect vulnerable communities.
Global temperatures reached 1.63C above pre-industrial levels in September. When roads, power, harvests and schools fail in the same season, production stops, tax revenue falls and the Government spends more to recover. New Zealand has already seen the numbers. Treasury put asset damage from the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle at between $9 billion and $14.5b and estimated a $400 million to $600m loss in economic output in the first six months of 2023.
In Tairāwhiti, farming, horticulture and forestry made up about 20% of direct regional gross domestic product (GDP) and Trust Tairāwhiti estimated losses of $415m to $475m across its focus sectors out to the end of the 2026 financial year. Our Government responded to Gabrielle with a partial payout scheme for properties zoned unliveable. That scheme answered one disaster and set no rule for the next.
I landed to news that East Cape communities face relocation. Last Wednesday, Gisborne District Council received reports on Hicks Bay, Onepoto Bay and Punaruku after January’s storm, which triggered 619 landslides across the Pukeamaru Range. Managed retreat is named as a long-term option for the most exposed properties. The reports do not identify which properties might relocate, who is responsible for relocation or acquisition, or what it would cost.
Those are the questions that matter. The communities in these reports are small, remote and largely Māori. By headcount, they will never top a national priority list.
The national framework does not answer these questions either. The Government released its National Adaptation Framework in October 2025 and the Climate Change Commission found it does not address the displacement of communities. The question of who pays was deferred to the next term of government and the commission says the framework gives no detail on when or how those decisions will be made. Councils must produce adaptation plans with no change to how they pay for them. The next term of government begins with Saturday’s election.
Communities are not waiting. In Whirinaki, South Hokianga, the community looked at the flood maps and concluded that managed retreat was the only answer. The plan is community-led, developed by Te Hikutū hapū and the wider community in partnership with Northland Regional Council. It keeps about 260 people and 43 homes together. The next step is securing the central government share of the funding. When the Crown does decide, it can move: $136m is relocating five Tairāwhiti marae to safer ground.
Other countries settled who pays before the flood. The Netherlands pays for its Delta Programme from a Delta Fund, a separate item on the national Budget that Parliament created in law and that averages more than €1.25 billion ($2.50b) a year. The money does not compete in the annual Budget fight. In New South Wales, the Commonwealth and the state jointly funded an A$800m ($9.97m) programme of buybacks, house raising and land for relocation in the Northern Rivers.
Planning is also the cheaper option. A major US study found that every US$1 invested in hazard mitigation saves US$6 in future disaster costs. Taxpayers already pay for disasters after the event, at emergency rates, with roads cut and businesses closed. Spending a dollar before the flood replaces the six dollars we spend after it. Treasury’s modelling shows greater floods and storms would leave GDP 0.7% lower by 2061, a slow loss of output and tax base on top of each rebuild.
New Zealand needs five things. First, legislate managed retreat, starting from the system the Expert Working Group on Managed Retreat has already proposed.
Second, set the trigger: the level of risk at which retreat begins and who holds the decision, whether community, local authority or Crown.
Third, set the money for before and after events by choosing between rates, a levy on beneficiaries, general taxation or a combination, setting the buyout rate and putting the result in a ring-fenced fund.
Fourth, fund technical advice so communities get it before they face the decision.
Fifth, attach funding to adaptation plans for priority locations in every region and choose those locations by risk and by the make-up of the region, with population size as one input only. In Te Tairāwhiti, some of the communities most exposed to severe weather are remote, concentrated Māori communities with small populations. A headcount test would never justify funding for them, which leaves these communities abandoned unless they relocate.
Cost per head is the wrong measure of who deserves protection. A plan with no budget behind it is a wishlist. These choices are political and each one has losers. Every government has put them off. The Government elected on Saturday should make them within its first 100 days.
Delay has a price and the bill grows every year. A community that plans its move chooses the site, the timing and who goes with it. A community that waits for the next storm gets moved by the water, on the water’s schedule, with roads cut, homes lost and whānau scattered.
Papua New Guinea shows what the absence of a plan looks like – and it looks like that today: women and girls walking hours for water, clinics turning away patients and the lights going out in the capital, with no co-ordinated response behind any of it.
If we turn a blind eye, our economy and our way of life get disrupted without us ever deciding how we wanted them to be. We have the reports, the examples from other countries and the communities ready to lead.
Decide now, or the next storm decides for us.
Kiri Allan is a former Labour Party minister who held the portfolios of Justice, Regional Development, Conservation and Emergency Management. She was the lead minister for the Cyclone Gabrielle response in Tairāwhiti. She is the founder of renewable energy company Four Directions Fund and runs the KLA consultancy firm.
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