Will the Beehive become beachfront property?

Climate change is often discussed in a global context. When we talk about a problem the whole world needs to solve, in theory it makes sense to talk about the impacts on a planetary scale. 

Most of us don’t live globally, though. We live locally. Our lives are defined by our neighbourhoods and communities. The effect climate change has on the whenua around us is about the most important context we need to make decisions on how to respond to it. 

I live in Wellington, and I have for over 10 years. This place is my home. I care about solving this global problem because I want to safeguard this place I care about so much – as everyone wants to do with their place in the world.

So let’s put this global problem into a Wellington context. 

I’ve taken some fantastic research from NIWA, the latest global summary from the UN’s panel on climate change, warming estimates from Climate Action Tracker, and sea level modelling from Greater Wellington Regional Council to paint a broad picture of what Wellington will be like under each degree of warming. 

What the New Zealand Government has promised versus what we’ll get based on its (in)action is the difference between a weird but sometimes better life for Wellingtonians, and devastating consequences for thousands of people. 

Let’s see what each degree of warming will do to Wellington.

Wellington at about 1.5 Degrees (What the government says it wants)

Let’s explore what Wellington would look like if the Government actually achieved what it agreed to on the world stage: 1.5 degrees of global warming. 

A heatwave that used to happen once a decade happens four times a decade – and it’s warmer than it used to be. With only 1.5 degrees of warming, expect summer to be nearly 30 degrees (which is the highest it’s been in Wellington ever) for around a week straight every few years.

These heatwaves will make life harder. More people will die of heat exhaustion, especially if they don’t have good air conditioning. Power outages will become more common.

Twice a decade, we’ll have a major storm – where it’ll drop 10% more water than usual into our sewer system. Expect flash flooding in Wellington City and the Hutt River to breach its banks.

In this scenario, lots of wetlands and swamps will be restored to absorb the worst of the flooding. Planting trees will slow the deluge, too. 

About 10,000 people are at risk of having their houses destroyed by extreme storms – totalling $2.54 billion of housing. These people are in significant hardship because their biggest asset (their house) is now worth basically nothing. Insurance companies won’t insure people’s mortgages who may want to buy in flood prone areas, so the wealth they tried to accumulate is wiped out.

At the same time, areas like the Wairarapa will have droughts twice as often as usual. It’ll be a struggle to maintain crops and lots of people will lose their produce due to weird mixes of storms and droughts.

Life is weirder and harder. 

But in this scenario, the government acted with wartime effort in the 2020s and 2030s to cut emissions, and some fantastic things happened.

Traffic is significantly less annoying. Far more people are carried on buses and trains and bikes, saving space on the road for people who need a car. You can leave your house to catch a bus and never have to check Metlink’s website to see when the next bus is. It’s always a few minutes away.

Because there’s no carbon-belching machinery on our roads or in our schools and homes, people have been living longer. You will live a longer life than you might have being exposed to toxic gases from cooking and heating your home. 

People will be generally happier with their surroundings. Everything you need would be a short walk away. Trees could be planted in urban areas, and native wildlife could return to urban areas. Expect to see beautiful kiwi and tūī wherever you go.

Our farmers will be in hot demand on the world stage because agriculture will adopt farming practices that suck more carbon out of the air than livestock put into it. 

Expenses will be significantly cheaper too. No need to suffer through shocker $100 bills at the petrol station or surprise mechanics bills to make your next WOF. If you do have a car, it will be electric – and your electricity bill would be so low it would be like paying $0.30 a litre to fill up a petrol car. 

It’s a weird world, but with a wartime effort to eliminate fossil fuels from our lives, we’ve made life better than it was and can get onto taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to get back to normal temperatures. 

Wellington at 3 Degrees (What would happen if everyone promised the same as NZ)

Wellington at 3 degrees is a very different world. This scenario is based on if the entire world did what the New Zealand government has promised to do. 

Heat waves that would normally occur once a decade in 2024 would now happen six times every decade. Temperatures in these heatwaves will rise to nearly 33 degrees for least five days straight. Trains will be cancelled because the rail lines will be too hot to use.  More people die each time the temperature soars. 

Storms that should happen once every ten years will be happening every couple of years. Plus, they’re even more powerful than at 1.5 degrees. They will be nearly 25% more intense than storms are in 2024 – so they destroy far more infrastructure and kill far more people. Flooding will inundate most of Petone and areas around Waiwhetū stream, and the lower sections of Porirua will be in more danger. 

In this scenario, 15,000 people are in the path of destruction from extreme storms. These houses are currently worth approximately $4.64 billion, and that’s not including the roads, power infrastructure, rail lines and more that will be in a path of chaos too. 

Food starts to become scarce and expensive. That’s not just because droughts become about three times more common than they are now – it’s because all of this horrible shit is happening overseas too. Demand increases and supply is ruined because of rolling natural disaster events. Even if we do have enough food, our farmers could make more money feeding people overseas, so prices will go up at home. 

By 2080, we will witness the last time the Artic freezes over – and it won’t freeze over again for centuries.

But thank God we got a tax cut, right? 

Wellington at 4 Degrees (What would happen if everyone did the same as what NZ is actually doing.)

All of those previous scenarios were based on what New Zealand has promised to do – not what it is actually doing. If the whole world followed New Zealand’s lead by promising a lot and not doing much at all, this is what Wellington will look like. 

Heatwaves happen every year, and will reach around 36 degrees for at least five days straight. With our humidity, this is reaching the point where going outside will be killing people. We physically can’t survive in temperatures above 36 degrees with 100% humidity.

On a positive note, the Beehive is closer to being a beachfront property. Sea level rise is high enough to consume a lot of the central business district and give politicians a gorgeous view. 

Storms are 40% more intense, drop 30% more water and happen far more often – three times every decade. 

Nearly 25,000 people are in the path of extreme storms, and need to find homes elsewhere. They’ve also lost all of their asset base – who would buy their land?

The Wairarapa is in drought every second year, and it’s significantly drier than the droughts we’re used to. Many farmers will lose their livelihoods to the rapid combinations of droughts and flash flooding from storms. 

At this point, there’s a risk that we hit a tipping point – where ice sheets entirely melt into the ocean and the sea rises to 1.75m above where it is. That means that basically all of Petone is under the low tide line. 

If we’re lucky, by 2300 the sea level will be 7 metres above where it was in 1900. The Regional Council hasn’t even provided this option in their model – but 5 metres of sea level rise means that means that up to Waterloo, all of Miramar and Kilbirnie, Plimmerton, and the low-lying areas from Raumati to Ōtaki will be gone. Add two more metres onto that – and you’ll have the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the sea level will have risen by 15 metres, meaning that Wellington as we know does not exist in 250 years. 

We need a wartime-level mobilisation to protect ourselves.

This last scenario is what successive governments have chosen for us with their actions. Labour implemented targets but didn’t use its time in power to radically reduce emissions this decade. They didn’t even put the industry responsible for half of our carbon emissions into the scheme that charges for emissions. 

And, unsurprisingly, National, Act and New Zealand First came in and burnt up practically every piece of policy that was doing anything about emissions. 

Our leaders could put their wartime hat on and face this challenge immediately. They could choose to rebuild our infrastructure to never need carbon again. They could protect tens of thousands of Wellington families from losing their livelihoods and endangering future generations. 

Instead, they’re choosing a world that suits them right now and fucks all of us in the long term.

As a country, I think we deserve to have our government work out this hard problem fast. How they do it is something I want to cover soon – but regardless of the method, it takes political leaders to rapidly cut out carbon. We can’t keep telling people to recycle our way out of this. 

Remember, we have the tools to do this. We have every single solution we need to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. And doing so faster means we have more time to develop technologies to suck up the carbon we’ve already belched out and put it in the ground where it belongs.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the first scenario isn’t possible any more. It is, if we act quickly. 

Do not count on bullshit promises. Demand immediate