Coastal Hazard and Climate-Change Risk Exposure in New Zealand: Comparing Regions and Urban Areas
Robert Bell, Ryan Paulik & Sanjay Wadhwa
Despite its hilly and mountainous terrain, New Zealand is nevertheless exposed to long-term risk from sea-level rise and coastal hazards in pockets of low-lying coastal areas where urban and peri-urban settlements are concentrated. Over 2015, the National Institute of Water & Atmosphere (NIWA) carried out the first nationally-consistent coastal risk exposure for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in New Zealand, using available high-resolution topography, asset, population and tide information. Such an analysis has previously been hampered by access to high-resolution topography datasets (e.g., LiDAR) and disparate databases on built assets. High-resolution GIS spatial modelling to determine the national scale coastal risk exposure was based on extracting areas of land in elevation bands above mean high water spring (MHWS) viz. 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 m above MHWS, from LiDAR survey data wherever available ? otherwise the lower-accuracy national DEM was used (partly based on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission). For the ?risk census?, demographics and assets such as buildings, kilometers of road/rail, land-use, land parcels and other infrastructure have been enumerated for urban areas, regionally and aggregated nationally from the NZ RiskScape, NZ Statistics and Land Information NZ databases in relation to the coastal-elevation bands.
Event: FIG Working Week 2016 : Recovery from Disaster
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