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How can we turn climate risk information into practical action? Drawing on the Aotearoa Society of Adaptation Professionals | Rōpū Urutaunga Aotearoa conference, Amanda Anthony and Karl Check explore how adaptation can deliver benefits now while preparing for longer-term change.
The ASAP | RUA conference brought together people from government, iwi, communities, research, finance, insurance and professional practice. Its theme, Whakawātea: Clearing the Way for Adaptation, reflected a challenge that reaches across these sectors: adaptation decisions connect people’s lives and livelihoods with the future of the places they value.
Start with what matters to people now
Too often, our response to climate risk is driven by the latest damaging event, with individual problems addressed as they arise. This reactive, piecemeal approach can leave communities unsettled and unprepared, facing repeated disruption without a clear picture of what comes next. The conference reinforced the need to plan earlier and use risk information across whole catchments and landscapes. Understanding the connections between natural systems, land use, infrastructure and communities helps identify responses that work together.
Long-term climate projections can feel distant. In a coastal settlement, the conversation may be with residents’ experience of repeated road closures, stormwater backing up during high tide or uncertainty about insurance. In another place, it may be a concern about wildfire, low water levels in a river they use for recreation, or disruptions to routes they use on a regular basis. Starting with these concerns and connecting them with the specific characteristics and values which may be exposed to risk helps people understand the evidence, consider the choices ahead and see how action today could benefit their community in the long term.
From there, a shared plan can address immediate problems while preparing for longer-term change. Some actions can begin now, such as protecting wetlands, improving infrastructure or avoiding development that increases exposure. Other responses may need to be staged over decades, with clear points for reviewing conditions and deciding when further action is needed. Including those possibilities in the plan gives communities greater clarity and time to prepare.
Building that shared direction takes sustained relationships and trust. Accessible information, ongoing conversations and meaningful opportunities to influence decisions help people understand the trade-offs and shape the response. This includes partnerships with mana whenua that recognise their knowledge, roles and aspirations, alongside support for communities to participate throughout planning and delivery. A shared vision can also make the wider benefits of adaptation more visible, including healthier natural systems, better public spaces and stronger community wellbeing.
Securing funding and agreeing how costs are shared remain major challenges. The costs of climate risk and our response to it are carried through rates, taxes, insurance premiums, property losses and recovery. Planning ahead creates an opportunity to direct investment towards reducing future losses and delivering wider benefits for the places and services people rely on. Questions about who benefits, who pays and who can afford to contribute need to be addressed early, alongside the technical work.
Work with the landscape and its natural systems
A landscape approach starts with understanding how a place functions, how it has changed and how people live within it. This applies across cities, urban neighbourhoods, coastal towns, rural communities, the fringes of towns and cities, and river and mountain catchments. Looking beyond individual assets, property boundaries and council boundaries opens up choices that might otherwise be missed.
This approach brings together the layers that shape a place: its geology, soils, landform, water, land cover and habitats, alongside buildings, infrastructure, productive land uses, cultural relationships and community values. Understanding how these layers interact helps explain where risks arise and where opportunities for adaptation may lie. Historic river channels, former wetlands and changing shorelines offer insights about natural processes, while development patterns show how we have altered those processes and shaped today’s exposure. This gives communities a clearer basis for deciding where natural systems can be protected, restored or given more space.
Working with the natural environment and its systems requires understanding and engaging with its existing inherent function. In rural and mountain catchments, restoring locally appropriate vegetation and wetlands may help manage erosion and runoff. Along rivers, reconnecting floodplains and providing space for water can form part of a wider flood response. Coastal adaptation may include restoring dunes and saltmarshes and allowing room for shorelines and habitats to shift. In urban areas, trees, rain gardens, permeable surfaces and connected green spaces can help manage stormwater and heat while improving everyday places.
These possibilities need to inform adaptation planning from the outset. Their suitability depends on local conditions, the scale of the risk, available land and ongoing management. Considering them alongside engineered infrastructure and changes to land use allows communities to compare combinations of responses, their costs and benefits, and the risks that remain. Looking beyond the immediate site also helps test whether an intervention could transfer problems elsewhere or limit future choices.
Connect evidence with place
Risk information becomes more useful when people can connect it to the places they know: their homes, routes to school, workplaces, gathering spaces and valued landscapes. Bringing technical evidence together with lived experience and local knowledge helps explain what is at stake, why it matters and how different responses could affect daily life.
Landscape architects and landscape planners contribute through their understanding of landscape character and values, natural processes, settlement patterns and people’s relationships with place. Combining field observation, spatial analysis, historical information and community knowledge helps reveal connections across the landscape and inform potential responses. This provides a basis for testing where development could be directed, where natural systems will remain or could be restored, where infrastructure needs to adapt and where space should be retained for future change.
Urban designers consider how neighbourhoods function, including the relationships between buildings, streets, public spaces and movement networks. Planners help translate risk information and community aspirations into policies, land use plans and consenting processes that guide adaptation and future development.
Ecologists assess ecosystem condition, habitat connections and the role that restoration can play in adaptation. Biosecurity specialists identify and help manage threats from pest plants and animals, supporting the protection of natural assets and the long-term success of restoration. Cultural advisers support relationships with mana whenua and processes through which mana whenua knowledge, values and aspirations inform planning and design.
Diagrams, maps, scenarios and visualisations make this combined understanding tangible. They can show how different responses might change a familiar place, who could benefit or be affected, and how individual projects could contribute to a wider adaptation pathway. They give communities concrete options to discuss, question and help shape.
Take a practical next step
For councils, communities and asset owners, decisions being made today will shape how places function and respond to climate risks for decades to come. Renewing infrastructure, planning for future development, restoring a river corridor or improving a neighbourhood’s resilience to flooding or wildfire all provide opportunities to build adaptation into work already being considered. Each is a reason to look beyond the immediate project boundary and ask how changing conditions could affect the wider landscape, the people who live there and the services they depend on. Bringing these considerations into planning early helps address current needs while reducing future exposure and keeping options open as conditions change.
Begin with a shared stocktake of natural assets, known risks and community priorities, mapped in relation to the decision ahead. Include the blue-green network: the waterways, wetlands, coastal habitats, vegetation and open spaces that connect a place. Identify what is functioning well, what is under pressure and what needs to be protected, restored or reconnected. Consider these assets alongside buildings, infrastructure, productive land and places of cultural and community importance.
Work in partnership with mana whenua and involve communities, landowners, infrastructure providers and relevant specialists early. Bring available evidence and local knowledge into the discussion, identify gaps and consider how those gaps affect the choices ahead.
Turn that understanding into a practical programme. Test options across the wider landscape, agree priorities and identify responsibilities and potential funding sources. Set out what can begin now, what needs further investigation and what may need to happen later as conditions change. Agree how progress and changing conditions will be monitored, and when decisions will be reviewed.
We came away from the ASAP conference encouraged by the knowledge and commitment in the room. The task now is to bring that capability together around particular places and help people make decisions they can act on.
