Source: Radio New Zealand
Slip clearing on the East Coast’s SH35 between Tikitiki and Te Araroa, 25 January 2026. Supplied/ NZTA
A climate scientist says it’s not too late for people to reduce emissions and slow the effects of climate change.
Last week’s storms in northern parts of the country brought a months’ worth of rain in a day to some areas. Six people are presumed dead in a massive landslide in Mt Manganui, while a woman and her grandson were killed when a landslip struck a home in Welcome Bay, Pāpāmoa.
Communities were cut off and roads damaged in Gisborne, Thames, Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Northland and the East Cape.
Professor James Renwick from Victoria University said while climate change was not necessarily creating more storms, it was adding to their intensity.
“Climate change is making the most extremes of weather more extreme.
“Higher amounts of greenhouse gases in the air traps more heat in the oceans and the atmosphere so there’s more energy around for storms to feed off.
“You get more intense rainfall because warmer air can hold more moisture, so when you get that moisture out of the air – by having a storm – you get more rain falling.
“You also get more intense droughts because it’s warmer and – when it’s not raining – evaporation’s working more efficiently and things dry out faster,” Renwick said.
A masslive landslide onto a campground at Mt Maunganui after torrential rain, 22 January 2026. RNZ / Alan Gibson
He said the gradual average growth of the world’s temperature – while slight – was having a significant effect at the extremities of temperature and rainfall.
“The changes in the climate so far – 1.5 degrees of warming and seven or eight percent more moisture in the air – these numbers all sound quite benign. Who cares about a degree of warming when temperatures can change by 10 or 15 degrees a day?
“One degree of warming can increase the frequency of high temperature extremes by a factor of three or four and that’s the same idea with rainfall. An apparently small increase in moisture in the air – when you concentrate that and wring it out in a storm – can result in much larger – 10, 20, 30, 40 percent increases in rainfall intensity depending on the time frame you’re looking at,” Renwick said.
Renwick said research at this stage suggested the path and location of storms remained relatively unaffected by global warming.
“In New Zealand the West Coast of the South Island is the wettest part of the country because the winds blow from the west and we’ve got big mountains along the middle of the South Island and the northern half of the North Island closest to the tropics so it’s most exposed to these sub tropical storms and ex-tropical cyclones. None of that geographical information is changing.
“But the intensity of the weather events, that’s what’s changing,” Renwick said.
Mark and Victoria Seymour, 13, work to clean up the stinky, stinky silt that has engulfed the long-time family bach. RNZ / Peter de Graaf
Renwick said witnessing recent storms and droughts as they impacted people and the country gave the climate science community “no pleasure” as decades of warnings and predictions come to fruition.
“I feel sad that the global policy community just hasn’t been able to find a way to take the response they need and reduce emissions of green house gases and even protecting communities from the changes we’ve already seen by adapting to the climate change we’ve already had.
“In that ten years [since the Paris agreement to combat global warming was signed off in 2016] instead of taking action we’ve just released more green house gases and there’s just no sign of any politicians, any governments around the world really taking this problem seriously.
Ōakura Bay Reserves Board member Malcolm Devereux, left, and chairman Glenn Ferguson start the cleanup of the devastated Ōakura Hall on 22 January 2026. RNZ / Peter de Graaf
“I don’t understand that. It’s an obvious threat to communities everywhere and aren’t governments supposed to protect their populations? They don’t seem to be too worried on this front,” Renwick said.
Flooding in Whitianga, 22 January 2026. RNZ/Charlotte Cook
But Renwick said individuals still had the ultimate power to influence climate change.
“Don’t give up, don’t despair. If we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow global warming at least would stop within a year or two. We know that know from recent climate model experiments. Yes, ice continues to melt. Yes, the oceans continue to expand and get deeper but the heating of the atmosphere, the change in temperature, that stops almost straight away.
“We don’t all have to become Greta Thunberg but if we all paid attention to what’s going on around us and acted appropriately that would make a huge difference. If everyone in the country drove their car one day less a week – or something like that – that would reduce our emissions a huge amount.
“People have a lot of power. I don’t think we realise how much power we do have,” Renwick said.
“Whether that’s personally by taking the bus instead of driving your car or helping your government to understand what they need to do – and why – by making some sort of political protest or writing to an MP. There’s a lot of actions people can take,” Renwick said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
