Raising Tomorrow's Infrastructure - Keeping Dunedin Above Sea Level Rise
Annual Conference
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Dunedin has many low lying areas, increasingly threatened by the sea due to climate change effects. The Dunedin City Council’s concern was to develop a workable policy that set minimum floor levels for new buildings above the predicted maximum sea level.
There are many dynamic and poorly defined elements that make up sea level. Storm surge, tidal effects, tsunami and sea level rise itself. A large number of reports, sometimes conflicting, on the topic had to be taken into account.
The challenge was to develop minimum floor level rules for tomorrow’s infrastructure that took into account all these variables yet gave simple definitive answers. Additionally, it has to be easy to update these rules as new information comes to hand.
This paper describes the methodology that achieves all these goals: definitive floor levels, acknowledgement of local variations, and a means to simply update without affecting credibility.
The ultimate validation was the wide public acceptance of the policy when announced as front page news. Even though minimum floor levels were raised significantly from previous levels, there was acceptance from insurers, the real estate industry, and the ratepayers.
The methodology developed is adaptable to any coastal community in New Zealand