Thursday, January 9, 2014

Sea level rise report will help Christchurch become more resilient

Scoop has a press release from the Christchurch City Council: Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel has welcomed a Christchurch City Council-commissioned report on the impacts of sea level rise for Christchurch and Banks Peninsula.

“What this report has highlighted for me is the importance of feeding this long-term horizon into our current planning processes, so the timing couldn’t be better as we begin our District Plan Review, which will include a specific focus on natural hazards. This report gives us the confidence to proceed with this issue in the first phase of our District Plan Review with an eye to the challenges we may have to confront so that we will be a more resilient city in the future.

“It will also assist us develop a city-wide Resilience Strategy, which is a component of being selected to join the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities Network announced before Christmas,” Mayor Dalziel says.

She says the Council will focus on working closely with the community on working through this and other natural hazard issues that impact on people’s lives.

“The level of community engagement that needs to happen regarding this issue has been largely absent from the decisions that have been made in relation to lan
d use since the earthquakes, so this report gives us a fresh start in terms of building a shared understanding of both the likelihood and consequence of natural hazard risk,” Mayor Dalziel says.

The report, commissioned from environmental engineers, Tonkin & Taylor, is a research paper which updates an earlier report prepared in 1999. This latest report takes into account current international science about the impacts of climate change on sea level rise, as well as the impacts the earthquake sequence has had on land levels in the city’s flood management areas....

Christchurch in 2008, shot by Mark Lincoln, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

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