As the residents of Nelson clean up after flooding that will take years to recover from, there are questions about how we can help now and what needs to be done to reduce and adapt to more flooding, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in The Bulletin.

Widening of Maitai River mooted in 2021

The flooding in Nelson last week was a result of the Maitai River bursting its banks. Flooding is not new to the people of Nelson. This history of flooding in the Nelson Tasman region documents multiple severe flooding events from the time of Pākehā settlement up to last year’s floods in July when the Motueka River burst its banks. A letter to the Nelson Evening Mail on March 10, 1913 addresses the “great question of deforestation” in relation to water volumes in rivers. Flood hazard modelling for the Maitai River was done for the Nelson city council in 2013 and updated again in 2021. A range of options to tackle flooding in the city,  including the widening of the Maitai River, were presented to Nelson city councillors in February 2021,

An alternative to engineering and human intervention

Widening the river is essentially river engineering, or human intervention in the course, characteristics, or flow of a river. For Nelson, these flood reduction interventions would be multi-million dollar engineering projects. There is an alternative viewpoint developing that recommends humans intervene less, and we make room for rivers. It’s the subject of this great piece from David Williams at Newsroom and a conference this year in November. Williams cites a €2.3 billion “room for the river” project in the Netherlands. Thank you to Tom, a regular Bulletin reader, for sharing some of this info with me last week. I’ve recommended this long read before, but a “Slow water” movement based on similar principles, led by landscape architect Yu Kongjian, is being embraced in parts of China.

Land buy back an urgent recommendation of flood inquiry in New South Wales

Looking ahead, these kinds of events are likely to become more frequent and there will be questions about whether people should be living in areas where flooding keeps occuring. The country’s new National Adaptation Plan is designed to address this but is short on detail about who will pay if whole communities end up permanently displaced or insurance won’t cover the cost of damage. In Australia last week, a scathing review into the handling of this year’s floods in New South Wales was released. One of the most urgent recommendations? A phased program to migrate people off the highest-risk areas through a significantly expanded land swap and voluntary house purchase scheme.

Mayoral relief fund open for donations

For the residents of areas hit by flooding last week, there are immediate and pressing concerns. So far, nine homes have been red-stickered, indicating they are uninhabitable, with residents unlikely to be able to return. Another 570 homes have been damaged. The wash-up of the damage caused is incomplete and residents met last night to ask for help. The residents of Nelson have also come together to help each other out, as demonstrated in this story from Stuff’s Amy Ridout. If you want to enter into this spirit of helping out, the Nelson-Tasman mayoral relief fund is open for donations.