Kate Hodgkinson, a natural resources analyst at the New Zealand Treasury, discussed the ways that climate change will impact New Zealand at day one of the three-day ForesightNZ workshop in Wellington on 27–29 April. You can watch the video of her presentation on the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube channel, or you can view it below.
Kate covered the post-Kyoto Protocol period and explained why New Zealand needs to be cautious of the consequences of detrimental weather events and rising sea levels. Kate encouraged the group to think more broadly about the long-term impacts of climate change to New Zealand society, by considering things such as changes to infrastructure and insurance.
Kate asked participants three key questions:
- How do we adapt to sea level rise?
- How do we bend our emissions curve?
- How do we decide what would be an appropriate split between our domestic effort and buying units overseas?
To watch more videos from the ForesightNZ workshop, head to the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube Channel.
The ForesightNZ: Untangling New Zealand’s long-term future workshop is a collaboration between the New Zealand Treasury and the McGuinness Institute.
About the ForesightNZ workshop
Project: ForesightNZ aims to build public policy capability in New Zealand by encouraging long-term, agile thinking around our uncertain future. Initiated in 2008, ForesightNZ is about conceptualising the broad range of possible futures for New Zealand through up-to-date tools and conceptual approaches used in the field of futures studies. The primary focus of the ForesightNZ workshop was to develop a way to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty in the world around us. After careful consideration of how best to achieve this, we decided to use this opportunity to create a robust foresight tool in the form of a card game. Participants developed cards based on the events and trends that they believe could significantly shape New Zealand’s long-term future, and with these designed a number of games to develop a deeper understanding of the possible futures that might occur if a small number of those cards played out in real life.