Climate change-induced erosion slowly eating away Port Waikato

Thursday, 19 July 2018

Climate change's impact is no longer coming.

In every metre of land nibbled from the North Waikato coast at Sunset Beach, Malcolm Beattie can see it's already here.

The Sunset Beach Lifeguard Service president has seen 30 metres of land lost to the ocean due to coastal erosion over the past several years.

Its effects were seen on the opposite coast when stormy weather just days ago caused the plinth dedicated to Captain James Cook at Mercury Bay, Whitianga, fall into the sea.

Further inland, farmers are also feeling its impacts. The industry took a battering earlier this year from ex-cyclones Fehi and Gita.

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Those same storms caused major damage to the Thames Coast Road, which the NZ Transport Agency just finished repairing.

It is also getting warmer. 

According to the Ministry for the Environment, Waikato can expect the average temperature to be 0.7 to 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer ​by 2040 compared with 1995. By 2090, it could warm by as much as 3.1degC. 

The number of frosts could decrease by 5 to 13 days a year, and the Coromandel could see them disappear. This could affect crops such as apples, which required chilling to develop buds for the following season.

The region suffered droughts in 2013 and 2015 and there were fears of another hitting last summer until Christmas rain came.

Victoria University climate scientist James Renwick recently told Stuff that even if the world follows emission reduction targets, the expected warming until 2050 is already happening and will be almost impossible to stop.

'Talking in 10-year averages 30 years in the future, we'd be looking at a few tenths of a degree [of warming]. That doesn't sound like much, but it is actually huge.

'We as people may not really notice, but plants and animals? The natural world will really feel this. We would see quite big changes in the ability of crops or different plants to grow in certain parts of the country. There would be an increase in droughts and heavy rainfalls.

'We've had about 20 centimetres sea level rise so far in New Zealand over the last 100 years or so. We're looking at at least that much again by 2050.'

The ocean is slowly engulfing the land at the west coast town of Port Waikato.

By full tide at the popular hot spot of Sunset Beach, the surf will be lapping at the bottom of the cliff edge, further eating away at the cliff face.

Several meters away on the sand sits a large concrete slab that was once part of the car park. Four meters above is a warning sign from the Waikato District Council of the dangers of the cliff face.

The lifeguard service's Malcolm Beattie says a combination of climate change exacerbated by poor decision-making by previous councils caused the damage. Twenty years ago, the council decided to build a car park above the beach. It created a cliff and the constant pounding of the surf gradually eroded away the car park.

'It's part erosion, it's part man-made and it's partly the way we get those big swells through.

'When we are patrolling in the summer, we have no beach. They just sit up here [in the car park] and wait for the tide to drop.'

Beattie says the service was told by an environmental expert that the advancing ocean is impossible to fight and the only answer is to retreat.

That spooked a lot of the locals.

He is more philosophical about it and believes the town and community will adapt.

'We are fairly pragmatic about these things. It is what it is.'

On the positive side, the ocean's advancement had slowed in the past 18 months and little damage has been done to the cliff face.

On the edge of the car park close to the cliff sits another casuality: the town's community hall. Its proximity to the cliff means, eventually, it will be unfit for use.

In response, the club is building a $1.9 million hub well back from the beach that includes both club and hall facilities.

While the club was the catalyst for this new development, Beattie says it was a community decision. He predicted resource consents would be lodged in the next few months.

'We are spending nearly $2 million on a new project and we have faith that it's going to be here and the council has faith in us.'

He is confident the new buildings will be safe from predicted sea levels and shows the community is taking the advancing ocean seriously. 

'You have to. There are some who have buried their heads up their arses and have said we are crazy building there because the ocean's going to come along and wash all of that away.

'We have said they may well be right, but you have no proof of that.'

If the naysayers are correct, then the ocean would travel down the road and Port Waikato would be 'screwed'.

But those fears come from the worst-case scenario based on modelling of sea level rises in 80 years.

More urgent are concerns around the effects of population growth. Port Waikato's numbers swell over summer from 428 to around 1500. Beattie says in February, visitor numbers were up by 35 per cent.

He believes those numbers will only get bigger with the projected growth in North Waikato towns of Pōkeno and Te Kauwhata as Port Waikato is one of the few beachside resorts nearby.

Residents Chris and Glennis Paton say climate change's effects are happening in front of their eyes.

'You can't stop it,' Glennis says.

'It's here, it's affecting us and I don't think there is anything we can do about it.

'Climate change - it's everywhere, it's Waihi Beach, it's Kāwhia, it's right down this coast.'

Glennis says she remembers in 1971 when Sunset Beach used to have a flat gentle slope into the water.

While there had always been a degree of natural erosion, it has become more obvious in the past eight years as the impacts of population increases and more extreme weather start to take effect.

Glennis says 5 metres alone was lost in one serious storm three years ago.

Locals had hoped the lost ground could be restored, but it became clear that to do so would be extremely expensive without any guarantee it would work. Erosion and its effects are the biggest community issue. Most of the residents have now accepted the hall had to go.

She says an electronic vote was planned in August on whether there would be a targeted rate to help pay for the new complex.

'We had a meeting recently and the consensus there was 100 per cent, but we have got to get all of the ratepayers to comment. 

'They might not be prepared to add money to their rates.

'It's certainly a huge issue at the moment. That and combined with the fact that the hall is under threat and that's very much community-based.'

The facility had 2600 visitors through it in the past year.

'That's a lot for a little hall. We need a hall. The school camp is available some of the time, but during the summer months it's flat out and there is nowhere else to go.'

The shifting environment is not just isolated to Sunset Beach. Glennis has noticed big changes at Mareti Bay in the dunes and river mouth.

The beach is a bay a few kilometres away from the bar into the sea. Stirred shifting sand means the bay is gradually getting shallower.

'There's just as much erosion in the river as there is on the coast and there is a huge amount of debris that is toppling in all of the time.'

The Waikato District Council commissioned a report in 2014 which recommended the Sunset Beach facilities undergo a managed retreat from the water's edge, chief operating officer Tony Whittaker says.

The challenge for the council was that the water's encroachment could take anywhere from six to 50 years before that retreat was fully required.

'What we are doing is keeping a close eye on everything so we can understand what is happening from that erosion perspective.'

'We're not panicking, we are keeping an eye on it, we're monitoring it.'

He says Raglan and Port Waikato were the council's priority areas with Port Waikato carrying the majority of concern from the council.

The new surf club hub was considered part of the council's long term plan and it is providing a $100,000 grant towards its development.

On the other side of the region towards the east, the Thames Coast Road which winds way around the Coromandel Peninsula is ground zero for coastal erosion.

​The 400 kilometre Coromandel coastline is one of the largest in New Zealand and according to the Ministry for the Environment, Wāikato had the highest level of road network exposed from coastal risk in climate change.

It is a threat local authorities are taking seriously.

In May, the Thames-Coromandel District Council approved $2.6 million of spending over the next three years to create a shoreline management plan.

In June it also adopted its Coastal Management Strategy to better plan and manage its resources and help coastal communities become resilient to the effects of climate change.

In it, any new council infrastructure would also be tested against a potential sea level rise of 1.4m by 2120 and up to a rise of 1.88m by 2150.

Mayor Sandra Goudie says the region has been affected by several storms over the past few years, most recently earlier this year that damaged large sections of the Thames coastal highway.

'Where are we at now? If you're being real, we are in between events. We always have been and we always will be. The weather pattern are changing so the magnitude of the events are changing.'

The council created a coastal management strategy which assess all of the council's coastlines and how it was going to manage vulnerable areas Goudie calls 'pinch points'.

She says the recent damage to the Thames-Coast Road had to be put into context. The road had little serious work for 30 years and NZTA have done a magnificent job in fixing it.

'I think the road is now way more resilient and it will be able to withstand a substantial battering in the future.'

Key to their strategy was getting community buy-in.  It made these people consider how they would deal with the impact of climate change within their own communities as well as making the small coastal communities dotted along the road better prepared when there were storms, she says.

It's put them in the best place possible to tackle future issues around climate change, she says.

'The key to all of that is re-raising the awareness of our many communities around the peninsula because what happens is that over time, people forget.'

They also look closely at what other councils around the country were doing adapt it for their own purposes where necessary to save costs.

At a national level, public consultation on the Zero Carbon Act closed on July 19.

It is designed to set a path for how New Zealand could meet and exceed its international obligations under the Paris Agreement rather than reverse the effects of climate change.

This is because New Zealand contributes about 0.17 per cent of the world's total emissions.

At its launch in June, Climate Change Minister James Shaw said making a plan and taking common sense action now will help avoid sudden changes in the future.

'The impacts of climate change are already real with more damage caused by storms, droughts, coastal and river floods - which don't just affect property but also have impacts on where and how New Zealanders live and work.'

It is a fact the residents of Port Wāikato and coastal Thames know too well.