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A tsunami warning alert is seen on a notice board above State Highway 1 in Wellington early on November 14, 2016 following an earthquake centred some 90 kilometres (57 miles) north of New Zealand’s South Island city of Christchurch. 
A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand early November 14, the US Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning and knocking out power and phone services in many parts of the country.  / AFP / Marty Melville        (Photo credit should read MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images)
A tsunami warning alert is seen on a notice board above State Highway 1 in Wellington early on November 14, 2016 following an earthquake centred some 90 kilometres (57 miles) north of New Zealand’s South Island city of Christchurch. A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand early November 14, the US Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning and knocking out power and phone services in many parts of the country. / AFP / Marty Melville (Photo credit should read MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images)

ScienceNovember 9, 2017

Why it’s so important to mark the anniversaries of earthquakes

A tsunami warning alert is seen on a notice board above State Highway 1 in Wellington early on November 14, 2016 following an earthquake centred some 90 kilometres (57 miles) north of New Zealand’s South Island city of Christchurch. 
A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand early November 14, the US Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning and knocking out power and phone services in many parts of the country.  / AFP / Marty Melville        (Photo credit should read MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images)
A tsunami warning alert is seen on a notice board above State Highway 1 in Wellington early on November 14, 2016 following an earthquake centred some 90 kilometres (57 miles) north of New Zealand’s South Island city of Christchurch. A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand early November 14, the US Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning and knocking out power and phone services in many parts of the country. / AFP / Marty Melville (Photo credit should read MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images)

Whether it’s one year or, in the case of the formidable Alpine fault, 300, looking back to these events should motivate action on building resilience, writes Ursula Cochran of GNS.

First, we remember the dead. The two Kaikōura earthquake victims weren’t killed by the earthquake so much as by failure of the buildings they were in. But a year on from the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that shook central New Zealand, is also a time to be thankful. Thankful that most of us who experienced the earthquake survived it, thankful that the earthquake didn’t happen under a city this time, thankful that it happened at night so no-one was buried under the numerous landslides on State Highway 1, thankful that the tsunami impact was lessened by low tide and a freshly uplifted coastline.

The first anniversary of the Kaikōura earthquake of November 14 2016 is obviously a time for assessing recovery. There is solid progress – everyone has food, water, power; the whales are back; the railway is open for limited services. But many do not have safe homes or even offices. State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura is closed and other parts of the highway network are fragile. Wellington’s port is only partially functional. Buildings are still being demolished. There are very many deeply tired and stressed people – on the land, in schools, businesses, government departments – all attempting to cope with upheaval and establish a sustainable “new normal” in the post-earthquake environment.

Graphic: GNS

This was a massive event for a small country to deal with. As we know from the Christchurch experience, recovery is a long process. So, we are now in a double-whammy of earthquake recovery, for, although we’ve marked the sixth anniversary of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, we have not fully recovered from that devastating event.

The surest way we can speed up recovery after future events is to build resilience – the ability to readily recover from shock. The word “resilient”, originally applied to people, is now applied to everything from pipelines that don’t break, or can be repaired quickly, to communities who support each other through a crisis. A little action on resilience planning and spending now results in less money spent in disaster recovery and, more importantly, happier humans. This is an important benefit of marking earthquake anniversaries – remembering how people were impacted and keeping resilience on national and personal agendas.

Measuring how far we’ve come as a nation in living wisely with earthquakes is a good reason to mark longer anniversaries of historical earthquakes. The sesquicentennial for the 1855 AD Wairarapa earthquake shone an interesting light on progress since European settlement of Wellington. Some strides have been huge – yes, we now know we live on a plate boundary, we’ve invented base isolators, and we have the Earthquake Commission. But can’t we hear the voices of those early Wellingtonians – those who witnessed the 1855 tsunami washing into Lambton Quay and who trembled in their tents for months after the earthquake – asking us so many questions? “Why did you keep building in unreinforced masonry? Why have you been building on low-lying land so close to the sea, and reclaiming land without strengthening it? Why have you been building on really steep hillsides?”

The problem is big gaps between big earthquakes. Earthquakes go off the agenda. We forget. That’s why I’m in favour of marking their anniversaries.

The Kaikoura earthquake. Graphic: GNS

Marking a three-hundred-year anniversary – a tricentenary – may seem ridiculous for an earthquake. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what earthquake geologists are doing at a conference in Blenheim in mid-November. Why recognise such ancient events? At an aspirational level it’s about striving to be more useful to society – collecting what we have learnt, highlighting what we don’t know, and asking, “What are the next most important questions we can answer?”

This year marks the tricentenary for the last major event on the Alpine Fault. In 1717 the earth’s crust ripped apart in a magnitude 8.1 earthquake. Mountain-sides fell towards the sea, rivers were blocked, forests damaged throughout the West Coast of the South Island. We were not around to witness. But there are trees that still bear the scars. And rocks and landscape have been interrogated to give us what we know of this epic earthquake.

The 1717 earthquake paints a picture of what the next Alpine Fault earthquake may look like – but now, when we add the people, buildings, transport systems, and water supply, the scenario gets much messier. The significance of the Alpine Fault tricentenary expands like a balloon when we consider how often these major earthquakes occur – on average every 300 years. When was the last one? Three hundred years ago.

Alpine fault. Graphic: GNS

The 300-year repeating pattern is known from recently-discovered evidence of 27 past earthquakes preserved like fossils next to the fault in Southland. We use 8,000 years of past earthquakes to peek into the future and see that the next one is inevitable. These earthquakes recur remarkably regularly in time but there is enough variability that we can’t pinpoint the year, or even the decade, when the next one will happen. We can estimate that there’s a 30% chance of the next big one happening within 50 years. We can’t predict earthquakes but this is one of the highest quality datasets worldwide for forecasting their likelihood – certainly enough to motivate action on building resilience.

Many people are hard at work. Individuals are beefing up their camping gear. Businesses are installing generators and arranging back-up communication systems. Hospitals are securing vital equipment. Marae are gearing up to be emergency centres. Organisations that provide life-lines (water, electricity, communications, transport) are making networks more resilient. Civil defence groups are planning how to best coordinate after such an event. Local government are looking hard at their land-use plans and considering moving whole towns. Ministries are reviewing policies and codes. And, hopefully, the new government will encourage more of this work across more of the country.

But you don’t have to spend much time or money to make your post-event life more comfortable. Time-travel briefly to the days, weeks, months after the next major earthquake / eruption / flood / tsunami / landslide and ask yourself what you’re regretting most.

“I wish I’d asked mum to collect the children on days when I’m out of town.”

“If only I’d stored more water, I wouldn’t have to walk and queue for so long.”

“It would have been good to have a bit more food so I could help the neighbours.”

“It’s my fault I didn’t secure that bookshelf…”

New Zealand is a stunning place to live. There’s no way we are walking away from it. We just need to keep learning how to live with our natural hazards wisely – in part by remembering the frightening events.

However, as George Bernard Shaw said, “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future”. Yes, let’s mark the anniversaries of earthquakes. Let’s remember them in vivid detail. And let’s use that memory to improve resilience – each of us in small ways – for a better future.


The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.

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A climate change protest outside Trump Tower in New York in 2016 (Photo: Getty Images)
A climate change protest outside Trump Tower in New York in 2016 (Photo: Getty Images)

ScienceNovember 9, 2017

I’m sorry, activists – but NZ’s climate target is actually fine

A climate change protest outside Trump Tower in New York in 2016 (Photo: Getty Images)
A climate change protest outside Trump Tower in New York in 2016 (Photo: Getty Images)

The issue is not the government’s target to reduce emissions, but how we will achieve it, argues Dave Frame of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute

The verdict on New Zealand’s climate targets is in. The judge dismissed the case. This is not always clear in media reports – some of them focusing on details of the judgment that appear to support the plaintiff, which seems a bit like writing about the 2015 Rugby World Cup final with a focus on the two late and thrilling tries scored by Australia.

Plaintiff Sarah Thomson’s own opinion on The Spinoff is that she won the case, kind of, because Justice Mallon claimed that following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in 2009, “the Minister was required to turn her mind to whether there had been any material change as between the AR4 and the AR5 that was relevant to the 2050 gazetted target, and… this did not occur”. Yet as the United Kingdom Committee on Climate Change wrote, “The overall message [of AR5] … remains remarkably similar to that in AR4.”

Ms Thomson celebrates this part of the judge’s verdict: “Widening the scope for climate change decisions to be reviewed by the New Zealand courts is a win.” This might be a little peremptory. Perhaps the most likely future plaintiffs are deep-pocketed fossil fuel and dairy interests; and unless the Crown can clearly show how it revised its decision in light of successive documents that were “remarkably similar”, it may have to go back to the drawing board. It’s a win for lawyers, for sure. For citizens, perhaps not.

But this win, kind of, for Ms Thomson’s lawyers is like those Australian tries in the Rugby World Cup final. The bottom line in the verdict is that New Zealand does not have to undertake an expensive and time-consuming process to choose new targets. Fundamentally, this is because the current targets are actually pretty reasonable. This may come as a surprise to those who have gained the impression that New Zealand is a long way off the play in terms of its climate targets, so let me explain.

National climate targets could be assessed in a range of ways – there is no single perfect measure. Ultimately, Mother Nature cares about cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, plus a little bit besides, but exactly what we use at the national level to evaluate relative national efforts is a fairly open question. Two obvious (but not perfect) ways of comparing international climate targets are 1) to compare among countries and 2) to look at what would happen if the whole world adopted the target. On both these measures, New Zealand’s targets are reasonable.

A protest against climate change policy outside the Trump Tower in New York. Photo: KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images

Firstly, our 2030 target – a -30% reduction on 2005 emissions – is similar to, or more stringent than, those of Australia (-26–28%), the United States (-26–28% by 2025), Canada (-30%) and Japan (-25.4%). Our target is roughly halfway between the European Union’s and Japan’s. So we have plenty of company in terms of our target, and these targets are generally at the strong end of the spectrum, as is expected from the world’s richer countries.

Secondly, if the rest of the world matched New Zealand’s climate change commitment out to 2050, then the world would be on course to meet its goal of warming by less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In AR5, which remains its most recent Assessment Report, the IPCC said that by 2050 global emissions need to be somewhere between -35% and -55% compared with 1990 levels. New Zealand’s 2050 target is -50% compared with 1990, which is clearly within range, and is in fact toward the more stringent end. Our 2030 target is slightly less ambitious but still broadly consistent with the IPCC’s 2°C-compatible emissions range.

Neither of these points was contested by the plaintiff’s experts. So either way, compared with our peers or compared with what the world as a whole needs to do, New Zealand’s targets seem okay. They are certainly not, as Ms Thomson originally alleged, “unreasonable and irrational”.

Perhaps the best way to put the issues of climate targets to bed would be to use an index-based approach to set targets automatically. That would provide a transparent, rational, evidence-based way of setting targets that would take account of a range of factors, such as efforts elsewhere, scientific developments, and the political preferences of the government of the day. Long-term issues – monetary policy, pensions, benefit adjustments – often make at least partial use of indices, and the idea seems worth thinking about in a climate change context, too.

So if the targets are reasonable, why the fuss about “inadequacy”? The answer is that climate activists – such as the cursory but influential Climate Action Tracker website – make these accusations about every developed country, including the EU. The result is a profusion of fairly puritanical assessments that are not useful for real governments. These assessments are a “view from nowhere” in the sense they are made by people who do not have to consider the trade-offs necessary for decarbonisation to take place. They do not need to worry about economic performance, social cohesion and the other things that actually form the main parts of what we expect from governments in liberal democracies.

The related view that developed countries should be doing more to eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases is a value judgement, not a scientific one. There are arguments to be made for and against a range of positions on these issues, and all I would want to note is that New Zealand’s interests – domestic and international – are just as legitimate as anyone else’s.

The real issue for New Zealand is not the targets, but achieving the targets. It is not ambition we lack, but action. Current policy will not get us to the targets we have set. This is also the case in other developed countries. The answer is to work on the policy, not to fiddle with the targets. We are like a boxer trying to drop a few kilos before a weigh-in who discovers his weight is increasing. Rational advice would suggest we focus on diet and exercise (policy), not on choosing a still more ambitious weight class (target). We need to eat less and get into the gym, not make new and more demanding promises.

In the climate policy case, the process of building policy is earthy, practical, slow and full of conversations about regulatory settings and marginal abatement costs. The emissions trading scheme on its own is insufficient to get us there. It needs regulatory support, and it needs complex social systems like transport to be thought about in a coherent, holistic and low carbon way.

Maybe this stuff is not as interesting or as inspiring as soap-box moments about global justice. But if we are sincere about being part of a global transition to a low carbon world, we need to work more on the bits that actually build it. I am pleased the judge agrees there is no need to revisit the promises we have already made. We have a more important job than making promises, and that’s delivering on them.

Correction: This story originally implied the US 26–28% emissions reduction target on 2005 levels, was to be achieved by 2030, it is in fact a 2025 target. 

Professor Dave Frame is Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, and wrote an affidavit in support of the Crown in Thomson vs the Minister of Climate Change.


The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.

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