Machinion Post

A report from the Climate Change Commission has found that delay in adapting to climate change is leaving communities exposed to damage and cost that earlier action could have avoided. A local government leader has called it "bonkers" that the Crown will fund disaster recovery after the fact but not the prevention that might have made recovery unnecessary. This newspaper does not use that word, but it does not dispute the point it makes.

What is at stake is not abstract. Every stopbank not built, every buyout not settled, every consent still issued on a floodplain is a bill deferred, not a bill avoided. It will fall on ratepayers first and on the next decade of taxpayers after that, once the recovery cheques start again. The Minister of Climate Change, Simon Watts, holds the National Adaptation Plan in his remit, and it is there, not in the Emissions Trading Scheme alone, that this failure sits.

The strongest case for caution is real and ought to be said plainly. Adaptation spending raises a hard question of who pays: the Crown, councils, or the property owner whose risk this is. Getting that wrong, or moving before the framework is settled, could commit public money to a formula nobody has agreed to and every future government would have to defend. A Minister weighing that against the Treasury's caution about new spending commitments is not being unreasonable to want the sequencing right.

But caution about sequencing is not the same as no timetable at all, and the Commission's report suggests there has not been one to speak of. Pricing emissions through the trading scheme is the right tool for reducing them; it is not a substitute for a decision about who pays to keep the water out. The country has had years of reports naming this gap. Another one naming it again, with no plan attached, is not a policy. It is a postponement, and postponement has a cost that the next flood will collect.