Te Uru Kahika: Before the Deluge
We made the case for co-investment between central and regional government to protect communities and businesses from catastrophic flooding.
Our national flood protection systems are outdated and change is required.
Flooding is one of the most widespread and potentially devastating risks faced by the country, yet our systems for protecting businesses and communities are outdated and increasingly under pressure. Regional Councils are responsible for flood protection, but are being squeezed between the need for greater investment due to the pressures of climate change, and the sustainability of existing rating approaches and a narrow revenue base.
Making flood risk visible
Aotearoa New Zealand has tens of billions of dollars of flood protection infrastructure, but it can be almost invisible in daily life – so we tend to take flood protection for granted. Our first step was to quantify the scale of investment, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of economic and social assets being protected.
Setting out the case for co-investment
Before the Deluge sets out the rationale for central and regional government co-investing in flood risk resilience, for the benefit of the entire country. The document identified the pipeline of projects that needed to be progressed, and set out a roadmap for delivering them quickly and cost-effectively.
The sector delivered
As a result of the co-investment, projects have proceeded, jobs have been created, and communities and businesses have been spared the disruption and impacts that would come from major flood events. The benefits identified in the document continue to be realised across Aotearoa New Zealand.
We worked at a national scale to address national challenges.
Regional councils work through Te Uru Kahika to coordinate their activities across the country, so we worked alongside Te Uru Kahika to gather data, collate inputs, conduct detailed analysis and present the findings.
The resulting document – Before the Deluge – has become the foundation on which further funding tranches have been delivered. This occurred because we were able to describe the sometimes complex challenges of flood risk resilience in a way that made sense to national policy experts as well as infrastructure engineers, in a form that showed our previous approaches were unsustainable.
The work across regional government resulted in the sector taking a joined-up and collaborative approach to this and subsequent funding requests, presenting the government with a coherent and deliverable national pipeline of essential investment.
Before the Deluge has resulted in multiple tranches of co-investment between the Crown and councils, covering more than $680m in flood resilience infrastructure projects. The first projects have been successfully delivered, and ensured that communities and businesses remained safe during Cyclone Gabrielle and in subsequent major weather events.
Before the Deluge has been updated multiple times, with the latest iteration proposing a long-term co-investment model for the Crown and councils that will provide national flood resilience for decades to come.
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