Newstalk ZB
By Kate Newton of RNZ Senior climate scientists say the major funding for extreme weather research is drying up just as the country needs it the most. In a joint comment provided to RNZ, three leading New Zealand researchers said there was little upcoming investment into understanding severe storms, even though that was how most New Zealanders were experiencing climate change at the moment. Their perspective was supported by the New Zealand Association of Scientists, which warned that changes to science investment announced by the Government this month could see even more funding diverted away from New Zealand-specific climate research. The Government said it invested around $170 million into climate-related research every year and “there will always be some who are disappointed at funding decisions”. University of Canterbury Professor Dave Frame, University of Waikato senior lecturer Luke Harrington, and Earth Sciences New Zealand researcher Suzanne Rosier wrote that the vast majority of New Zealand’s extreme rainfall was driven by “atmospheric rivers” arriving from the tropics. Recent research had made good progress in trying to understand how climate change was influencing that, but major projects were now ending, with little to follow them. “Just as the costs of extreme weather are becoming more and more apparent, our ability to understand and inform adaptation actions has diminished.” While rain events had been striking the country for “millennia”, things were now changing as Earth warmed, they wrote. “As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapour. When those atmospheric rivers come out of the tropics, they contain more moisture than they did, providing the potential for more rain when they strike.” Speaking to RNZ on the trio’s behalf, Dave Frame said researchers knew that storm behaviour was also changing, with total rainfall squeezed into a shorter timeframe. “So that’s an amplification of those very wet events when they actually occur, often on quite short timescales of a few hours.” Both ends of that rainfall distribution were changing, meaning longer dry and drought periods too, he said. ‘Large investments’ have ended There were “large investments” in previous years to learn more about those atmospheric phenomena, he said, including two major Endeavour Fund research programmes totalling $25m, and the Deep South National Science Challenge, which Frame directed in its first year. But all three of those programmes have now ended, with many outstanding questions. “There’s quite a few questions about compound events, where you’ve got different sorts of events combining with each other in a way that really makes risks go up quite fast that we’re really still pretty uncertain about,” Frame said. “Things like the particular timings of events, whether or not you get an atmospheric river at the end of a drought, what the interactions between things like snowpacks in spring, the melting snowpacks and an extreme rainfall event are like, the interaction between sea level rise and extreme rainfall.” Flood damage in Punaruku, Te Araroa on the East Coast. Photo / Supplied He and his colleagues worried there was little funding on the horizon to continue that work. “I think a lot of people around the country would find [it] a bit crazy, actually, that just as... people are really feeling the sharp end of climate change through these extreme events, there’s been a bit of a walking back from investing in the science.” In a statement, new Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Penny Simmonds said $170m was invested in climate-related research each year, alongside another $70m committed to the Natural Hazards and Resilience Platform between 2024 and 2031. RNZ searched some of the major researcher-led contestable funds for climate-related projects. Endeavour Fund grants for all projects with a major climate change element to them totalled $463m since 2010, with just under half of that to be spent between now and...
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