Jack Tame: Gabrielle turns climate change theory into reality

<p>It’s here.</p> <p>I think we’ll look back at 2023 as the year in which the realities of climate change chickens really came home to roost. The year in which for a lot of Kiwis, it went from all being a bit theoretical to being on the front doorstep. Or the basement. Or the downstairs bedrooms. Or pouring down the walls.</p> <p>Sure, droughts have been a bit more frequent, Coromandel and Westport have been flooding, the glaciers have been retreating for years and the Ruapehu skifields have had a terribly lean few winters, but the weather events of the last few weeks have clarified our new reality.</p> <p>Policy makers talk about two different responses to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. We obviously haven’t mitigated. We all know that. For all of the UN conferences, the lofty speeches, the pledges, all the international carbon credits, globally we haven’t reduced our emissions in a meaningful way. In New Zealand, we’ve barely reduced them at all. It was only a couple of days before last month’s floods that the new Prime Minister extended the fuel excise tax cut... yet again.</p> <p>But actually, the greater realisation for many Kiwis this week is that we haven’t adapted for climate change, either. We were woefully unprepared for a storm of Gabrielle’s strength. Roads, pipes, electricity networks, telecommunication... Cyclone Gabrielle didn’t just batter the North Island, it completely humbled our infrastructure. It says something pretty stark that in 2023, five days since the storm, with all our mighty technology, thousands of New Zealanders are still officially uncontactable.</p> <p>I understand younger people’s bitterness at the situation. The cost of mitigation and of preparing our infrastructure so that it’s fit-for-purpose, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars in New Zealand. Trillions of dollars, maybe. Generations that have had it pretty good for most of their lives won’t have to foot the bill. The politicians and governments that didn’t invest in the future, that worried more about