Representatives from the Carterton council rural advisory group, and Masterton, Carterton and South Wairarapa district councils attended a workshop facilitated by Greater Wellington Regional Council on climate risk impact on the rural community.

Presenting at the event, Jake Roos, climate change manager at the regional council said recent windstorms were just one example of extremely powerful weather.

“Our emergency operations centre at Greater Wellington was activated three times this year, and the last time it activated in the Wellington Region was in June 2021 for the Wellington South Coast swells,” he said.

“It's been a very busy year for weather and it’s all been severe winds.”

He described how changes in the earth’s patterns were expressing itself in more extreme weather.

“Rural communities are in the firing line, essentially,“ he said.

“There’s the immediate impact of things being damaged, but they don’t necessarily need to be on the farm of course. Down South it’s the rural power networks that have taken a hiding and really tested the resilience of those communities.”

“It's a really stressful time for those communities. When these events happen its hard.”

He said climate change could be expected to make events like this more frequent, which presented new challenges.

“When the hits are more frequent. When it’s not every few years, but every year or several times a year then you are in a completely different territory in terms of being able to cope.”

He said while Wairarapa was getting dryer, the effects didn’t need to be local to affect the region, with global supply chains likely impacted.

Tom FitzGerald from Greater Wellington council addressed Wairarapa risks.

He said the Wairarapa climate could be expected to get hotter and drier. Decreases in seasonal rainfall could be as much as ten per cent less in Spring, Summer and Autumn by the end of the century.

The region would likely be more susceptible to drought, and to heatwaves.

He said water resources could expect to come under pressure. Drier conditions could threaten the productivity of key agricultural sectors like farming, horticulture and viticulture.

“Drier and hotter days can lead to harsher fire seasons, that can start a bit earlier,” he said.

“Large forestry areas are crucial to the local Wairarapa economy; significant fire damage would lead to direct timber losses and job impacts.”

Fitzgerald said flooding and transport disruption were other possible direct impacts for Wairarapa.

“Transport disruption is a key one. If you think about where those key roads or bridges are and how they might get impacted. You see that on a reasonably frequent basis already,” he said, adding power, rail, rural roads and telecommunications were also vulnerable.

Parts of the Wairarapa coast was experiencing subsidence meaning local sea level rise could cause impacts to manifest sooner. Some coastal communities like Ngawi and Mataikona were particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and erosion, or to being cut off or isolated.

Fitzgerald said the mandate from central government was to focus on the areas of highest risk.

He was leading the regional adaptation project which would align with the Government’s National Adaptation Framework, to help identify risk and develop a local adaptation plan.

“So that’s essentially investing in those areas that are at highest risk, going through a process to understand what the impacts could be, what some of the options might be, and how those options might change over time,” he said.

“We have to deal with the here and now, but there are some impacts that will be increasingly severe over the decades to come.”

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.