Environment – Confronting climate realities

Life’s a beach when you live in New Zealand. With our long skinny islands, you’re never really far from the sea. The town furthest inland is Garston, south of Lake Wakatipu, past Kingston, and even from there in a few hours you can get to the ocean. Here in the north, with our balmy climate, sheltered waters on the East Coast and wilderness black sand surf breaks on the west, I feel part of a strong ocean culture.

So after a dismal Auckland summer and an even more dismal winter, it was a great joy to finally have a fine day, and get out in our kayak. The sea was flat even though the air reminded us that spring was yet to arrive. We launched from Ōtanerua/Hatfield’s Beach. We drag-carried the kayak down a jumbled pile of boulders that was keeping the sea from the road.

While the west coast beaches of Muriwai, Piha and Karekare have been especially devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, the East Coast wasn’t unscathed. So we kayaked past both small slips and big landslides, areas where erosion and instability have chewed away huge areas of land, exposing clay, causing cliff sides to fall and killing trees. Gullies have collapsed, spilling soil into the ocean. Along the scenic coast, clifftop houses now perch precariously over space which was once sound footings. Beach morphology has changed, with some beaches shallower, others steeper, from the soil and sand picked up, churned about and laid back down.

Many beaches in New Zealand are now highly modified – natural environments constantly in flux – and built upon. Roads run over them officially, unofficially, vehicles hoon up and down them, like that day at Hatfield’s. Beaches and their infrastructure, are inherently vulnerable to climate change, with its worsening storms, larger waves. But the efforts to protect these places with huge dumped boulders, also erode natural character and public access to the coast.

For the moment, the temporary, emergency rock wall at Hatfield’s protects a valuable infrastructural asset – the road. But Hatfield’s Beach is just a sand spit with a road built on top and on through the estuary. The latest emergency works cost $180,000, and were in addition to a series of previous attempts to ‘shore’ up Hatfield’s to protect the boat ramp, the trees and the road – all precarious. But we can’t sandbag our way out of the climate crisis or build rock walls to hold up every bit of eroded coast or collapsing hillside and its infrastructure. Communities around New Zealand are confronting the reality that whole towns and their roads, too, may have to move.

In the meantime, the sea will come in, the coast will erode, short term fixes will continue. We’ll keep drag-carrying our kayak over rock walls and sitting in our kayak staring back at the changing land.