Written By:
- Date published:
11:40 am, January 25th, 2026 - 22 comments
Categories: climate change, disaster -
Tags: bryce edwards, Mount Maunganui
People have died, and some of the bodies are still to be recovered. More houses are being evacuated in parts of the country due to slips. Many roads and bridges are still closed or at risk. A lot of people are in an emergency. Can we please take care in how we have conversations about all of this at the moment?
Bryce Edwards has a post up on his Democracy Project substack and twitter, Shock turns to anger at Mount Maunganui, talking about tragedy and politics, and summarising some of the media coverage in response to the disaster at Mount Maunganui and across the North Island. It’s very good and one of the most important things to read on New Zealand, climate and how this tragedy happened.
Edwards starts by talking about the appropriateness and timing of politicising tragedies.
There always comes a point, after a “natural disaster”, when someone says that it is “too soon” to ask hard questions. The Post’s editorial today predicted this perfectly: “There will be some who say it is too soon to talk about climate change while the search for bodies is ongoing. They will say the commentary is ‘politicising’ the tragedy. But the reality is that rather than too soon, it may be too late.”
That line will annoy people. But it’s still true: disasters are political, because the risks were set by decisions made long before the rain arrived. Such disasters are political because they occur when weather collides with decisions about land use, infrastructure, safety regulation, emergency management, and, increasingly, climate policy. When people die, the question is not whether politics is involved, but whose politics has been quietly shaping the risks in the background.
Edwards’ post covers just what those politics have been. Please go and read the whole thing to understand the mix of dynamics at play that led to multiple safety failures, and the conversations that need to come next, I’m adding links to the referenced articles below.
It is political, but I don’t consider what Edwards has written to be politicisation of a tragedy, in the sense of using other people’s misfortune and alarm to manipulate politics. Nor is talking about the climate crisis and responsibility. The timing matters and I am glad this wasn’t published while we were waiting to hear if anyone survived and while crews were actively engaged in a rescue operation. Out of respect for the families and friends of the missing people, and because we need a moment to breathe and take in the enormity of tragedies and how they change everything.
There’s also something about not adding fuel to the polarisation in New Zealand around partisan party politics and who is to blame when something so shocking is unfolding. My own experience of active emergencies is that partisan politics becomes irrelevant, we are thrown into utterly relying on each other. People need time just to deal with what is happening.
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There’s a lot in the rest of Edwards’ post and the linked media pieces, they are the start of a long, complex conversation of New Zealand’s precarity and the levels of climate denial most of us, to varying degrees, are engaged in.
The thing to understand about climate change is there is no end, and it flows through absolutely everything. It’s different from White Island, or the Christchurch mosque shootings, both terrible tragedies for individuals, communities and the country, and ones that we can eventually recover and move on from. Maunganui will be like that, but the climate crisis won’t. It requires wholesale change and transition for the rest of our lives and beyond, yet we are still acting as if it’s something over there that doesn’t affect us. Until it does.
In that sense I feel relieved, that finally we are at the point where people in positions of power are saying out loud, right now, that we have to have the conversation despite the circumstances. I don’t expect everyone to feel like this, and looking at social media it is clear that the polarisation is in full swing. But those of us that can need to have the conversation, not least because new kinds of climate denial are on the rise, but also, if we’re honest, there is no good time now, we just have to do it. Not despite the pain and suffering of many people in recent days, but because the very nature of the climate crisis is we need to act now to prevent even more and much much worse. This is breaking with convention, and because of that we need to take some care.
We get to have a say in how that conversations goes, especially on the left. Do we want to engage in blame and finger pointing as if the climate crisis is always someone else’s fault? Or do we want to engage deeply with our families, neighbours, friends, colleagues, any of whom might vote for parties or politicians who are leading us down a terrible path? What would that conversation look like? Are we likely to get good change if we start with blame and accusation? Or is there a different path opening up before us now?
Climate change is a crisis, and like other disasters, we are all in this and are utterly dependent upon each other. This doesn’t mean not having the hard conversations about responsibility and change. It means acknowledging first that we are all human and that this acknowledgment is essential to any meaningful change.
Edwards talks about our patterns of responsibility,
Reid Basher, an expert on disaster risk governance, has warned us about exactly this pattern. After every disaster, he notes, inquiries tend to “take a close‑focus approach and be preoccupied with finding out where laws were broken and who may have failed in their accountability. Too often the finger points at hapless, mid‑level functionaries who were tasked with too many responsibilities and provided with too little funding.”
He invites us to imagine an inquiry that instead “unveils the trail of accountability that reaches the very top”, exposing the “longstanding inadequacies in political commitment, laws, policies and public investment on disaster risk and its management”.
To this I would add it’s not only a wide focus that reaches the very top, but a deep systems focus that looks at why New Zealanders vote in climate regressive governments, and why progressive parties are caught between that rock and the hard place of needing votes to effect any kind of change. The left desperately needs to move beyond narratives of ‘we (or more often, you) should do x, y, z’, to conversations about strategy, what works, what doesn’t, and what we all can do.
Humans generally, urgently need narratives of a future that works out ok. At the moment we are possums in the headlights, stuck between the terrifying and overwhelming nature of potential catastrophe if we don’t change, and a deep fear that we will not survive if we do. Both seem inevitable but they aren’t. We have to break the headlight spell in order to see the good futures we can transition to once we start to act.
Editorial: The cost of climate change (archived version)
Mike White, Nikki Macdonald, Andrea Vance, Katie Hunter, Deena Coster and Henry Cooke: Mt Maunganui landslide: Should the warnings have been seen? (archived version)
Max Rashbrooke: This week’s floods show why we need to talk about climate change – and keep talking
Reid Basher: Plenty of action on disaster risk, some of it progressive (archive version)
World Socialist Web Site, Tom Peters: Up to 9 people killed in New Zealand landslides, flooding
Otago Daily Times, Editorial: It’s climate change, stupid (archive version)
Thanks to the other TS authors in the discussion around what is appropriate at this time. This post is from my own personal perspective.
As always under my posts, no climate denial, including it’s too late, it’s not that bad, humans didn’t do it.
Cheers weka.
Politically it is a hard sell especially individual politics.
As the sign on the back of a semi trailer advises us:
"Don't like trucks? Stop buying s#@t. Problem solved ".
Doubly awkward to invoke meaningful change as it can be seen as an invite to virtue signal. What could go wrong there.
As a bigger picture take, maybe Trump has done us a favour by partaking in a little economic nationalism. His tariffs, trade decisions can be start of a dismantling of globalism.
What is that globalism?
Is it the UN?
UNSC and the UN Charter?
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
ICC & ICJ
World Food Programme
UN Development Programme
UNHCR
UNESCO
ILO
WTO
UNCLOS
UN Climate Change Conference (COP 21 2015)(Paris Accords)?
We need gloablisation, to deal with global issues.
Guess why American exceptionalism is otherwise.
As someone with 24 years of experience in the NZ Meteorological Service, I have something to offer in historical terms:
Since my time there in the 70s, 80S and early 90s, there has been a welcome change when it comes to acknowledging the onset of global warming and the effect it is having on our climate. But it has been far too long in coming. The primary cause boiled down to political meddling both within the Service and amongst dinosaur politicians from the Conservative Right, together with their powerful industrial mates. Their buttons were set on denial mode out of nothing less than monetary greed. They still exist of course, and they have to take the bulk of the blame for the situation we're in now.
I well remember the reluctance of our climate scientists (no, I never reached such lofty heights) to publicly comment on the urgent need for measures to combat the effects of AGW. A couple of them tried and ended up being fired for their efforts – one of them publicly, the other not so much.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2009/05/01/science-body-speaks-out-on-salinger-sacking/
Hence the reason why whenever there was a major weather event over the past 30 plus years, there was rarely a mention of the underlying cause. Even now they are wary of saying too much. I was on duty during Cyclone Bola and I recall thinking "at last they will start to take global warming seriously'. No such luck.
The NZ media also have to take a significant share of the blame. Their readiness to treat the matter as a game of one-up-man-ship between the 'believers' and 'non believers' played a role in confusing the voters into thinking it was a political issue and not for real. SHAME ON THEM.
So, there had been a Tauranga Council investigation and report that stated the Maunga was at risk of landslides in severe weather. However, they didn't concern themselves with the risk to the campsite because it was not funded by/for rate payers.
This highlights the piecemeal approach to resilience, and that lack of coordination from the very top – ie the govt.
Someone I know who lives in Tauranga described the overnight rainfall (preceding the slips) in ways that sounded like what it was like in the heavy downfall of rain during the Auckland Anniversary Day floods in 2023.
The Tauranga deluge, and others in Northland, etc, came almost 3 years to the day after the Auckland floods. It's Auckland Anniversary Day tomorrow.
This is starting to look like a bit of a pattern.
Anyway, during those 2023 North Island floods, there were landslips, including deathly ones onto coastal properties at Piha. So if there had been better risk assessments and prevention measures, the Tauranga Campsite would have been flagged a lot earlier and loss of lives prevented.
The person I know in Tauranga lives in a fairly new development with expensive properties, and said their drainage systems worked very well in the deluge. So, it seems expensive properties are more likely to be built in a safe way, compared with land used by lowly campers.
Still happy enough to rake in the dough from the rates paid by that site for the dubious privilege of being within the council's bailiwick. What were the site owners getting in return?
Still happy enough to rake in the dough from the rates paid by that site, for the dubious privilege of being within the council's bailiwick.
The campsite is actually owned by Tauranga City Council and by the looks of their website, operated by them too! Beachside Holiday Park is one of their websites along with libraries and the airport. Scroll down to the footer on the Councils home page.
https://www.tauranga.govt.nz
Global Warming is related to our infrastructure resilience.
So I asked AI a question – Does New Zealand have a plan for Global Warming resilience?
Fortunately it said we did.
Extra details
If this works, will we be sorted by 2028?
PS
So since 2023 … we have not …
There was of course the Resilience Fund in 2023.
Then Finance Minister Grant Robertson set up the fund with $6B in 2023 to address vulnerabilities in NZ’s infrastructure to extreme weather, with a focus on transport, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure (set up after Cyclone Gabrielle).
The government is inept. Normal budget processes will not cope with this (the random and yet more regular events), so provision needs to be made separately.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360937473/christopher-luxon-stands-scrapping-6b-resilience-fund-created-after-cyclone-gabrielle
Mt Maunganui is an adaptation failure. A sensible CC adaptation plan would have removed people in densely-packed, vulnerable structures like tents away from slopes with a history of slipping. Some, maybe many, camp grounds would have become less profitable – would we have compensated them and if so what would it have cost and what will it cost in future? Would any such effort have failed because a section of the political class called it 'red tape', 'unnecessary regulation', 'wasteful spending' or an example of 'the culture of no'? Yes, probably.
No amount of emissions reduction (CC mitigation) within NZ would have prevented it. NZ needs to pursue emissions reduction for a different reason – to avoid one of the classic pitfalls of collection action, the problem of freeloading. If any party attempts to gain the benefits of collective action without contributing to that action, it encourages others to do the same and puts the whole collective project at risk, or it is punished by other members of the collective action group. CC mitigation is also expensive, like CC adaptation.
On top of these two expensive challenges we also have other expensive challenges: an historical infrastructure deficit; an aging population; a healthcare system failing its citizens; spiralling inequality and the new challenges of security and defense when the hegemon we once depended on becomes predatory. We are in quite a hole now – and still the political will to act sanely is lacking.
Yes, it's a class and capital event. Given the known risk, the campground (and the surf club) seems to have been the only entity allowed to operate in the immediate area.
Normally capital would have looked upon this site with envious eyes but they stayed away. The council, government, planners, insurers etc accepted the risk was to be born by low income campers and surf lifesavers which, in an event, would be able to be moved more quickly than hard residential asset structures.
But they didn't follow through on their plan because it was left to ordinary members of the public to action an evacuation. There was no official local warning despite metservice declaring the region red heavy rain.
In an ideal world this would have evacuated people from at risk sites.
This article from Martin Brook, Professor of Applied Geology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau shows the geological risk was very well known by science and authorities. I expect it was also well known by Maori, but that's not real science of course…
The geology part of this tragedy is nothing to do with climate change, the geology has always been present and evolving. The previous slips may or may not have happened regardless of climate change but direct human intervention (deforestation) and warming oceans have made these event more frequent, that's a good bet.
…Maori understand the land and the risk. Pakeha are seduced by profit and asset building.
To Muttonbird at 5.1 :
Re your reference to deforestation as major cause of landslips, I wholeheartedly agree. This was pointed out to me as a preschooler in backcountry Otago in the early 1930's , and I've noticed that knowledge being used widely in Otago after WW2 as farmers planted trees below small slips to forestall what had been caused by removal of forest (bush) of early blocks of land.
Sadly though, in many parts of NZ, introduction of forestry with its sudden areas of clearing produces a more speedy damage.
There certainly hasn’t been any leadership from the government on this at all.
It looks like climate change is a culture war topic. We can’t mention it.
It certainly seems that we are now prone to storms in January. Is it 3 or 4 years now? These storms have caused flooding, landslides, property destruction, wealth destruction and death.
There’s certainly been no coordinated response by the government. The most we’ve seen is them berating local government and lecturing them not to charge rates at a level to secure their infrastructure or invest at any great level. And now this new takeover of local government does something? I’m not sure. Avoids more responsibility.
Having bailed out and rebuilt Christchurch, Auckland properties and the East Coast last time, we’re going to just say no at some point, so tourists can see our broken society in flood ravaged lands and abandoned flood damaged houses.
We have plenty of communication around fire risk. Little to none about climate change risk.
Remember think of the future: increase speed limits just around schools. The kids have to take personal responsibility. Attack health funding as it costs more. Use ‘the climate change’ model.
It’s like the wankers complaining about too much spending during the pandemic who didn’t need government assistance, took it and certainly didn’t repay it.
Then applauded as Fuxton lectured 18-19 year olds for not getting jobs that weren’t available and then lectured their parents and said that they were to continue to be financially responsible so he could free up a bit of cash for his KPIs.
Just because you are doing nothing, with extreme spite, doesn’t make it untrue that there are things that could and should have been happening.
I’m not in a position to say the tragedy could be as obviously prevented as Cave Creek. But greed and ideology played a role in both.
I'm entirely happy for tragedies like this to be "politicised," because climate change is making these disasters worse and our response to it as a society is necessarily political.
That said, we have to steer clear of a message of "These people died due to govt's lack of action on climate change," because reasonable people are naturally wary of someone drawing such a long bow. We can't say of any individual storm, flood etc "This wouldn't have happened if not for climate change," so the message has to be more "These events are being made more frequent and more severe in their effects by climate change." If that's the message, yes let's politicise the hell out of this.
That’s letting the government off too easily. Your message is 3 years old. The government got that message then and…?
If we say what you said, we can also observe that the government has deprioritised understanding and awareness of climate change.
On a macro-level they’ve undone almost every action to contribute to an international effort to reduce the effects of climate change through reducing carbon emissions.
Members of the government have referred to ‘looney greenies’ and made this a woke green culture war issue, alongside trans rights, Maori language and diversity in general. And yes speed limits outside schools.
They’ve prioritised international investment, except for wind farms.
On the micro-level, I’m not sure how their directions have been to councils or land owners. It doesn’t feel like there’s a connected communication strategy about risk, given storms, that now appear seasonal, of this strength. It doesn’t feel like there’s a national strategy or philosophy around adaptation, let alone a conversation.
For example, there’s a website where you can check if the water has too much poo in it to swim, and there’s plenty of signs warning about conditions for lighting fires if camping or working outside or even just smoking in a dry season. There were TV education campaigns and radio.
Your message that there will be unusually strong storms with unforeseen consequences due to their severity arrived 3 years ago if it hadn’t registered earlier. Apart from saying we’re going to stop helping people because it’s expensive, what else has been done to assess the risks and communicate them?
It’s a little like them selling off public housing of last resort and allowing no fault tenancy cancellations and then acting surprised when numbers of the homeless go up. Over 5,000 of those now. Build more private prisons I guess?
There are clear failures in their approach to climate change and these newly seasonal storms.
And perhaps it’s a matter of philosophy, but I think most New Zealanders who don’t reflexively deny it exists, would expect climate change to be something New Zealanders would find responses to as a country, rather than individually and haphazardly.
Current govt's approach to environment is the same as Key govt's: pay lip service to accepting climate change is happening while running policies entirely predicated on it not happening. And its core support (on social media at least) is people who can see that 'one in 100 years' events are now happening nearly every year and conclude that this means meteorologists are no good at numbers. When I say "politicise the hell out of it" I mean "politicise the hell out of it against the current government and for a change of government to one that will take this seriously."
Up thread the question was asked "What is globalism?"
Globalism as it effects us in Aotearoa includes: A 'global' dairy price paid by us for while ignoring the impacts on the climate, waterways and roading.
Having foreign canned peaches in supermarkets driving the local growers to cut down their orchards.
Foreign owned banks issuing credit and exporting billions of dollars of profit annually.
Globalism has us importing foreign nurses, a lot of which leave for Aussie once their citizenship is acquired, skewing the make up of the workforce. Rather than training and recruiting locals that reflect our population.
That is without going into supply chain disruptions (Marsden Point) and foreign ‘investment’ distortions eg housing markets.
global economy rather than internationalism
@ weka above.
I would like to see a lot more economic nationalism and more than a sprinkle of autarky.
Medicines for example, reasonably paid jobs, security of supply.
The reason I evoked the T word was that he has repeatedly shown the rule book can be overlooked.
Both Adern and Peter's in the honeymoon phase of the 2020 election
said neo liberalism (interchangable with globalism in my mind) wasn't working for too many of us. That's why our choice at the ballot box is choosing the least shit option in regards to CC.
Invoking Trump is hugely problematic because he's holding the door open to fascism. He's not going to replace neoliberalism with something better. For NZ, we have a reactionary populist movement arising alongside the predictable polarisation of politics. That's a dangerous mix. Invoking Trump under those conditions seems reckless. We can have post-neoliberal conversations without that.
The people in NZ that have a gut understanding of how neoliberalism has fucked us over need better stories than that of Trump. Unfortunately we're not really getting them on the left.
ok, but breaking convention in the way he is doing is not something NZ governments can do. He's not undoing neoliberalism, he's assaulting democracy and the rules based order that stops nations from being continually at war and allows some progress on human rights and things like global responses to climate change.
We can do all the work we want at the community level (and we should, as a priority), but if we don’t address climate change our communities won’t survive. That requires an international effort, not isolationism. We can have international effort and local economies.
A fifth of the UK’s power comes from offshore wind farms.
I hate that these spineless jerks are New Zealanders. There’s nothing special about us We’re just a milder ex-colony than some.
Things could have and still can be done on the macro level.
And thumbs up PM above. For some reason having trouble replying on that thread.