Te Ao Hurihuri Te Ao Hou: Our Changing Coast follows on from the NZ SeaRise Programme.
NZ SeaRise was a five-year research programme funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Fund. It brought together 30 local and international experts from Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, GNS Science, NIWA, University of Otago and the Antarctic Science Platform to improve projections of sea-level rise in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The sea-level projection and mapping tool was developed by Takiwā, a Māori-owned data management and analytics platform that is now part of Toha.
Future projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) updated in 2021–22 confirm that sea-level rise is accelerating. The localised projections from the NZ SeaRise Programme explicitly include the effect of local upward or downward movement of land locally on sea-level rise.
These new projections affect present workflows for practitioners, so the Ministry for the Environment has updated its sea-level projections in it’s 2024 coastal hazards guidance to take into account vertical land movements. The guidance is also connected to the first National Adaptation Plan (see Chapter 4), which councils need to “have regard to” when making or changing policy statements or plans from 30 November 2022.
You can find academic outputs from NZ SeaRise here.