When we decide together, we build a better future.

As a hilly coastal city with many of our roads and other critical assets situated at or near sea level, the functioning of our city depends on adapting our infrastructure to be resilient to climate change.

What happens over the next 10 to 100 years will affect how future generations live in the places we love.

Effective climate action requires strong leadership, robust planning, and meaningful collaboration with Wellington’s unique and diverse communities who know their places best.

To meet the growing impacts of climate disruption, we need to re-think our places, spaces, services, and infrastructure (including community support and climate planning); and make decisions using local evidence about what will work where, and what aligns with the values of mana whenua and communities.

Simply put: the work won’t be effective unless it’s community-informed.

Together, we’ll rise to the challenge. We hold the following goals:

• Increase collective understanding of local climate change issues and opportunities for adaptation.
• Develop shared understanding and accessibility of options for how to adapt to increased climate disruption locally.
• Build an evidence base to guide future city-wide adaptation planning and strategies.
• Ensure suitable options are identified and assessed, relevant to a wide range of groups who contribute to local adaptation, including home-owners, infrastructure owners, utility providers, and developers.
• Strengthen local community resilience to climate impacts and disruption.
• Develop a process that can be repeated in other areas of the city to support fair decision-making that aligns to other resilience-building activities in the city.
• Build capacity for ongoing climate adaptation planning, within the Council, communities, and mana whenua partners.

We’re running a pilot in the Paekawakawa Island Bay and Haewai Houghton Valley areas to test a new design for a process to address climate disruption in water catchments.

This pilot will first focus on one area of the city, with the intention to work in other priority areas once it’s completed and reviewed.

A water catchment is an area of land where rain collects and drains through streams, pipes and over roads and land out to the sea. In Wellington, the edges of our water catchments are often the ridgelines of our hills.