Adapting to natural hazards and the impacts of climate related disruptions is essential to protect our communities and ensure long-term resilience.
Tasman’s unique geography and landscapes, combined with our weather patterns, makes us vulnerable to a range of natural hazards. As climate change accelerates, weather-related natural hazards will increase in both frequency and intensity. From rising sea levels to more frequent extreme weather events, these changes present growing risks to people, property, infrastructure, and the natural environment.
Consideration of natural hazards and climate change effects has been embedded in the Council’s decision-making and work programmes for a number of years. Alongside our resource management and building consent processes, we are working on projects to enable infrastructure resiliency, catchment management and enhancement, and safeguarding key ecosystems. The Tasman Climate Change Response and Resilience Strategy sets out our actions that will benefit the community by focussing on adaptation and resilience to natural hazards and climate impacts, alongside mitigation actions.
Adaptation is not just about responding to immediate threats; it’s about ensuring long-term resilience and creating a sustainable future for everyone in our district. It involves adjusting our decision-making, policies and practices to reduce the long-term risks posed by natural hazards and climate change. This will ensure that communities can continue to thrive despite changing conditions.
By focussing on adaptation, along with preparedness and response actions, we can build more resilient communities, reduce the costs of natural hazard and climate related events, and ensure future generations inherit a safe and sustainable environment.
In October 2025, central government released a “National Adaptation Framework(external link)” which sets out the government’s long-term, strategic approach to help New Zealand prepare for, and respond to, the impacts of climate change. The Framework is built around four pillars:
Resource management system reform is a focus of the Framework’s actions. Under the new system, councils will be required to identify areas with natural hazard risk, and areas for future growth and development, through new ‘regional spatial plans’. The Framework is signalling the key role that spatial planning will have in identifying areas that are exposed to climate-driven natural hazard risks, and a future amendment to the Climate Change Response Act will require councils to prepare adaptation plans in these priority areas. Council’s adaptation work will need to deliver on these future legislative requirements once known.
Between 2019 and 2022 Council initiated the ‘Coastal Management Project’ aiming to enable our Tasman Bay/Te Tai o Aorere and Golden Bay/Mohua communities to work towards long-term adaptive planning for sea level rise and coastal hazards. Early stages focussed on raising awareness and developing a common understanding about what we know about sea level rise and coastal hazards, and the high-level options that enable us to adapt. This work was guided by recommended good practice set out in the Ministry for the Environment’s Coastal Hazards and Climate Change Guidance 2017 (updated early 2024).
The work we have completed to date under the Coastal Management Project will stand us in good stead for responding to future central government direction such as the RM reform and local adaptation planning.
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