The Post: This week’s floods show why we need to talk about climate change - and keep talking

Read the original article in the Post

The most dangerous way to deal with this week’s North Island floods would be to treat them as a one-off event. They are, in fact, an emblem of the damage we do by burning fossil fuels. This is the core truth, and as the floodwaters recede, it must be broadcast again and again, if the public is to be stirred into tackling climate change with the urgency it deserves.

Many readers will have sensed something wearily familiar in this week’s news reports. There have been 20 “red” weather alerts since the Met Service introduced that warning label – the toughest in its arsenal – in 2019. Combined, these alerts recount a tale of accelerating damage.

Flooding hit Southland in early 2020, then Canterbury in 2021, sparking local states of emergency. In 2022, Cyclone Dovi brought record rainfall to the North Island, closing State Highway 1. Later that year, floods caused widespread damage in both Gisborne and Nelson.

Few people have forgotten 2023’s devastating Auckland Anniversary floods, or the destruction later wrought on the East Coast by Cyclone Gabrielle. Then there was 2024’s flooding in Otago, a repeat of the Top of the South floods in 2025, and severe storms elsewhere across the country last year.

Such storms have always occurred, of course, but as the scientist Kevin Trenberth points out, climate change makes them much worse: more common and more extreme. Burning fossil fuels heats the globe. And in that warmer world, extra moisture evaporates from bodies of water, building up in the atmosphere and loading storms with ever-greater power.

At other times, conversely, excess heat dries out the land, leading to more droughts. We now spend less time in typical, “healthy” weather, and more time in the extremes of wet and dry.

This will only worsen. In the words of Hayley Fowler, a Newcastle University climate scientist: “This is the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime.” Other scientists have calculated that climate change already costs the globe $16 million an hour in extra floods, hurricanes and heatwaves, a bill that could rise to $3.1 trillion annually by 2050.

These facts are not stated often enough. Scour media reports of this week’s floods, or previous extreme weather events, and you will find few mentions of climate change.

Reporters on the ground are understandably focused on getting first-hand interviews and visuals. In this polarised age, editors are also mindful of not being seen to push an ideological stance.

But the link between climate change and increasingly severe weather events, far from being a political statement, is simply the scientific consensus. If citizens are to properly understand the forces behind everyday phenomena, that link needs to be made clearer in reporting, especially when it has an analytical component.

Our politicians should also be making this connection more often. The reason this matters so much is that so little else seems to capture public attention.

The dire consequences of a warming world, some decades hence, remain remote to many people. By contrast, the increasing ferocity of current weather, and the damage it does to lives, livelihoods and property, is immediately tangible, and impossible to deny.

This week’s events should be used to put pressure on a Government that is failing calamitously on carbon reduction. Its plan for 2026-30 leaves us 84 million tonnes short of our official target, an amount equivalent to more than one year’s emissions.

Pointing out that this failure will contribute to more floods and droughts does not amount to exploiting a crisis; it is simply telling the truth. Of course our total emissions are small in the global context, but they are among the highest on a per-person basis.

We also face a moral responsibility to shoulder our share of the burden rather than lag behind the best performers, as we currently do. And if we shirk our responsibilities, we encourage others to do likewise.

Yet although the climate may never improve, we can help ensure it does not greatly worsen. We can limit, too, the harm done to the poorest households, who are likely to be most affected by climate change despite having done the least to cause it.

According to the World Inequality Database, someone in the highest-earning tenth of New Zealanders has a carbon footprint three times that of the average Kiwi. Even worse are the hyper-wealthy 0.1% with their heavily polluting super-yachts and private jets.

This is not to let everyone else off the hook. We can all live more environmentally sustainable lives, and collectively rewire our energy, transport and housing systems.

But the pictures we see of this week’s catastrophic floods are pictures of ordinary people, many of them not especially well-off, bearing the consequences of a situation created disproportionately by the affluent. That is not a comfortable conversation for many New Zealanders – but it is the conversation we need to have.