By Alexandra Cain

Cyclone Gabrielle caused enormous damage across the northern and eastern regions of the North Island in February 2023, wreaking a path of destruction across homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods that could cost upwards of $4 billion.

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Cyclone Gabrielle caused 225,000 homes to lose power, and resulted in extensive damage to roads, as well as electricity, telecommunications and water infrastructure. The government says Cyclone Gabrielle was the biggest non-earthquake disaster ever to hit New Zealand. Many lessons are being learnt that will help the country’s infrastructure to respond the next time a tragedy hits.

Infrastructure New Zealand Policy Director Michelle McCormick says one of the main lessons is that infrastructure that was appropriate decades ago is no longer working, which is particularly concerning given that climate change is expected to increase the number and intensity of natural disasters.

‘Those planning, funding, and building infrastructure need to up their game and adapt to our new environment,’ says McCormick. ‘The culverts, for instance, that channel water through or around obstacles in our suburbs were simply not built to take the volume of water that spilled towards them this year.

‘We need to build back better. Every time infrastructure is replaced or built new, a sustainable design with climate change in mind must be top of our list, not simply an afterthought.’

McCormick wants authorities to commit to a forward plan and ‘have those hard discussions to figure out how we will pay for all the infrastructure we desperately need’. 

‘At the turn of the year, we were already grappling with a $210-billion infrastructure deficit. A pipeline of essential work should be guaranteed outside election cycles, with associated funding locked in.’

New priorities needed

It’s a sentiment with which Telecommunications Forum Chief Executive Paul Brislen agrees.

‘Resilience isn’t just about being good at the last crisis – it’s about being prepared for the next one,’ he says.

Brislen says the telecommunications sector was ready when the cyclone hit and no cell phone towers were damaged. ‘On the ground, we were organised ahead of time, but no-one was prepared for the scale of what happened. So, what we have done is reset our expectations for what we need to have on the ground prior to a disaster. We had about 30 or 40 generators, but it turned out we needed 100 at a minimum.’

Access to energy is a salient issue for resilience in the telecommunications sector, as it considers how best to prepare for the next crisis. ‘We are totally reliant on electricity to make the network operate, so improving the resilience of the electricity sector is about being able to deliver power across the board,’ says Brislen.

Equally as important, he wants to see the telecommunications sector prioritised as an essential service. ‘We’ve become more and more reliant on telecommunications to coordinate activity in a disaster, but we’re still treated as a nice-to-have, not an essential service. That’s something we need to change.’

Brislen says there’s an opportunity to explore how the role of the National Emergency Management Agency may play out in future emergencies. The agency’s role is not to manage emergencies, but to coordinate information sharing.

‘Instead of them telling us what to do, they were asking us what we wanted to do,’ he says. ‘We have to work through how that will work in the future.’

Of course, the big issue is how the impact of climate change will influence future natural disasters. According to Mohamed Abdulahi, Director of consultancy Partners in Performance, the recent storms show how damage to infrastructure assets as a result of climate events can rapidly cause devastating economic, social and environmental impacts.

‘While many referred to the floods as a one-in-200-year occurrence, we certainly can’t afford to be complacent. This is especially as experts expect events like this to increase in frequency over the coming years and decades,’ says Abdulahi.

With costs from natural disasters forecast to rise, Abdulahi says there is value to be gained from better adapting infrastructure assets for extreme climate events. ‘Early adaptation of our infrastructure is a cost-effective solution [that] businesses and governments alike should consider.’

The Global Commission on Adaptation report, ‘Adapt Now: A Global Call for Leadership on Climate Resilience,’ shows that investing one dollar in infrastructure resilience is expected to yield close to four dollars in net benefits by 2030. ‘Despite this, there has been a global continued underinvestment in infrastructure adaptations,’ says Abdulahi.

Recently undertaking work for a large Australian infrastructure provider, Partners in Performance found that investing to reduce infrastructure at risk by 90 per cent out to 2050 for existing and planned assets could generate average annual returns of more than 30 per cent on a Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This result was achieved by reducing exposure to remediation costs and revenue leakage.

‘This is net of the broader social and environmental benefits the proactive resilience investment would yield,’ says Abdulahi.

The RCP 8.5 pathway is a scenario used in climate modelling to project future greenhouse gas concentrations and their potential impacts on the climate system. This pathway represents a future scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase throughout the 21st century without significant efforts to mitigate climate change. It assumes high population growth, limited technological advancements and a heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

‘Infrastructure providers need to better understand value-at-risk and get traction on building climate resilience,’ says Abdulahi.

A measured approach

Partners in Performance recommends infrastructure companies follow a three-step approach when assessing their assets’ climate risks.

Know where your highest risk assets are:

Build a resilience scorecard and rating system, including acceptable residual risk levels.

Build a view on future climate event trends, covering frequency, intensity and duration of climate events threatening infrastructure.

Evaluate assets against the scorecard, based on their vulnerability to climate events and the consequences of failure – economic and non-economic.

Build a pathway to resilience:

Collaboratively create solutions for at-risk assets, exploring resilience, reliability, redundancy, response and recovery.

Allocate financial and human capital based on the value of adaptation measures, and the ease of implementing them.

Don’t allocate in a vacuum – implement decision‑making criteria that weigh climate resilience against competing uses of business resources.

Hardwire climate resilience into the organisation:

Investments are only one step towards a climate‑resilient organisation. The right governance, early warning and recovery capabilities need to be in place.

Just 24 hours’ warning of a coming storm or heatwave can cut the ensuing damage by 30 per cent.

Take steps to ensure planning isn’t a one-off annual process, so factor in climate risk and adaptation solutions early in project definition and capital budgets.