A new game from NIWA uses research into flooding and economics to play out a version of our climate changed future.
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As the climate warms, the chance of severe floods or storm surges increases. It’s like rolling a dice, where the dice is increasingly weighted to water sloshing through gardens, into houses and over farms. New Zealand’s coastal communities are particularly vulnerable: as sea level rises, groundwater levels will rise too. The threat of water from the sky above, the sea beyond, the ground beneath, and the streams and rivers that run through communities.
The challenges for people living and working near the coast are enormous. It’s important to understand, in detail, what climate change will mean for people living near the coast in Aotearoa. Where is water rising fastest? What role can adaptations like stopbanks or wetland restoration play? How will people respond when they’re asked to make hard choices?
Niwa’s Future Coasts Aotearoa five-year research project is focused on coastal lowlands. It has produced groundwater maps, examined the impact of waterlogging on ecosystems and looked at different options for adaptation to “unstoppable sea level rise”. But for the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders living on coastal lowlands, that research can be hard to get your head around, so the research group has produced a game.
In the game, the dice roll of natural disasters is literal. Each round represents 10 years, and ends with a dice roll for a storm surge, of varying severity, and a flood. You can play as a dairy farmer, a townsperson or a kaumatua. Each role has different options: it’s a lot easier for the dairy farmers to sell their farms and move, as they have more capital. The kaumatua can’t sell at all, but must consider moving buildings or urupā to protect them from the inevitable floods.
“There are so many places around New Zealand that this scenario could apply to – like, we saw the destruction of stopbanks after Cyclone Gabrielle,” says Scott Stephens, the chief scientist for coasts and estuaries at Niwa. Developing the game drew on Future Coasts research, but also involved economists and social scientists, and was tested by local councils, who are often at the forefront of climate adaptation.
As in real life, there are different options for adapting to the rising waters, too. Nature-based solutions, like restoring wetlands or planting natives, can limit the damage of a flood. Stop banks and sea walls offer more protection, but if the flood is too big, they’re totally destroyed and have to be rebuilt.
I played the game several times, occupying a couple of the different roles, to get a sense of the mechanism. The feeling of unfairness started to haunt me. When I was a townsperson, it wasn’t my fault that my house got flooded, twice, and I ended up having to move in with relatives! It wasn’t my fault that the new house I bought was in a flood prone location, because it was all I could afford! When I was a dairy farmer, I was frustrated at the lost income after having to repair my farm. It went underwater and became worthless. I became self interested: I focused on spending money moving my house and raising my floor level first, before investing in flood protection that could benefit the whole community.
It only takes about 10 minutes to play eight rounds, representing 80 years, and it’s worth doing. The cartoon-style art is approachable, the mechanism simple and the reality the game represents is absolutely terrifying. “Sea level rise is like this bulldozer: it keeps coming in and it’s not going to stop,” says Stephens. “This is the kind of thing we’re going to see happening more in the future.” This happens visually in the game. By the second half, representing a time 40 years in the future, part of the coastal town has disappeared under water, and the odds of severe floods and cyclones increase.
It’s one thing to know that sea level rise is happening; it’s another to realise that your grand plans to do more to protect your community are being ruined by another flood. The game makes the stakes for individuals more obvious. There is a personal cost to a climate hazard which can endure long past when a flood or storm surge actually happens. “The choices you make are long lasting, you don’t have as much time as you might think,” Stephens says.
I realised as I played the game that to maximise my chances of being able to stay in the town, it was best to invest in flood protection and to move my house as soon as possible. “There’s a temptation with the economics,” Stephens says. “At first you think ‘what if I do nothing and just keep the money,’ but you learn something as you keep playing, that it’s better to spend money first.”
While the game uses a simplified hazard map, many councils have produced detailed hazard maps of flood prone areas. These have financial consequences, too: insurers use them to determine premiums in some areas – especially because climate change minister Simon Watts is yet to release a national adaptation framework for the country. For many people, the Future Coasts game is something they’re already living.
The conclusions might be dispiriting, especially because so many communities in Aotearoa have already been devastated by floods exacerbated by climate change in the last decade. But there’s a hopeful aspect, too. “We have choices,” says Stephens. “You can do things differently [as an individual] and there are community wide solutions.”