Our Climate Shock Resilience and Adaptation project, completed in 2025, was funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change fund and focuses on the vulnerability of the primary sector and land and water management decisions to our increasingly volatile climate.
Extreme events like severe flooding and storm surge, and changes in long term average temperatures and rainfall have dominated the discourse in climate change risk and adaptation research and practice to date. The effects of increasing volatility, which can manifest as more wet year-dry year, hot year-cold year, or drought cluster sequences, have received much less attention. Previous studies have shown that the impacts of this increasing volatility are often much more significant than changes in long-term averages, a finding corroborated by our research.
Modelled changes in average temperatures and rainfall are generally presented for distant timeframes, e.g. 2050 and 2100, because the effects of global heating generally only emerge from the model “noise” after significant temperature increases. These distant futures are well beyond the time horizons for many land and water management decisions.
This project delivers a practical, evidence-based framework to help New Zealand’s rural sector and regional councils manage the near-term challenges of climate variability and climate shocks. By moving beyond long-term averages, the research quantifies how consecutive adverse weather event sequences impact farm systems, stream health and rural finance and economies, providing much-needed location-specific risk and adaptation insights for finance, policy, and planning decisions.
Our first research phase has been published in Climatic Change with a second paper in submission and a third in progress. Key findings are summarised as research briefs for Regional Councils and the Rural Finance sector below.
Key Outcomes
- Developed and applied an integrated modelling approach combining climate, hydrology, pasture growth, farm economics, and stream health models, exploring 295 million climate sequences for two North Canterbury sites.
- Demonstrated that increasing climate variability—not just changes in long-term averages—is now a critical challenge for land, water, and ecosystem management. Historical data underestimates risk and can lead to significant policy errors if used for future planning.
- Showed that policy design—especially water allocation rules—can either strengthen or weaken farm and community resilience, with risks and benefits varying sharply over even short geographic distances.
- Developed a four-step, scalable framework for councils and the rural sector: 1) define critical stressors and horizons, 2) generate location- and time-specific climate variability datasets, 3) deploy impact models, 4) identify adaptation and resilience thresholds for both economic and environmental outcomes.
- Highlighted that action on-farm (such as lowering stocking rates or investing in water storage) and adaptive water management policy both play key roles, but priorities must be shaped by local risk profiles and economic realities and that some adaptation options can prove to be maladaptive.
- Provided stakeholders with new, probability-driven metrics for scenario planning and exploring trade-offs between rural solvency and stream health under real-world external pressures like interest rate and commodity volatility.
- Confirmed that proactive, scenario-based adaptation—supported by dynamic adaptation policy pathways—can be explored to manage risks to rural economies and ecosystems as climate variability intensifies in coming decades.
Who Will Benefit
- Regional council planners, science teams, and climate adaptation specialists
- Farmers and rural business advisors seeking evidence to support adaptation strategies
- Policymakers and rural lenders managing financial risk under a changing climate
This research was led by Kōmanawa Solutions Ltd with expertise from Primary Insight, Bodeker Scientific, regional council collaborators, and sector partners and was funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries’ SLMACC programme.
Research Brief for Regional Councils
Research Brief for Rural Finance