A groundbreaking research project in Te Waipounamu is changing how Aotearoa measures the threat of climate-driven flooding, combining advanced science with mātauranga Māori to calculate something conventional hazard models have struggled to capture — the potential loss of whakapapa, wāhi tapu, mahinga kai and cultural connection to whenua.
The work centres on Te Pokohiwi o Kupe, the Wairau Bar near Blenheim, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s earliest known places of human settlement and a site of immense cultural, ancestral and archaeological significance.
Developed through a partnership between Rangitāne o Wairau, Earth Sciences New Zealand and Marlborough District Council, the research has been named a finalist in the New Zealand Science Awards for its innovative approach to understanding flood risk.
Rather than measuring only how many buildings, roads or dollars could be lost, researchers have asked a fundamentally different question.
What happens when climate change threatens the cultural identity of a place and the people who whakapapa to it?
Up to 75 percent potentially affected
The physical projections are confronting.
Advanced modelling indicates that by 2130, up to 75 percent of the low-lying area could be affected during a one-in-100-year storm event under projected sea-level rise.
That matters because Te Pokohiwi o Kupe is considerably more than vulnerable coastal land.
The area contains wāhi tapu, urupā, archaeological material and ancestral remains, carrying evidence of some of the earliest generations to settle Aotearoa.
Recent extreme weather has already demonstrated how vulnerable the coastline can be.
Rangitāne o Wairau says repeated major weather events since 2022 have accelerated coastal erosion, increasing concern that archaeological material and ancestral remains could become exposed or washed away.
Putting mātauranga Māori into the model
The first stage of the project developed the scientific flood model.
But Rangitāne and researchers then went further.
With funding from Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake, wānanga and interviews with kaumātua were used to bring intergenerational knowledge of flooding, coastal change and cultural relationships with the whenua into the research.
That knowledge was then translated into indicators capable of being incorporated into the hazard model.
The result brings two knowledge systems together.
One measures water depth, flooding, erosion and sea-level rise.
The other helps measure what those physical changes could mean for whakapapa, urupā, mahinga kai, ancestral relationships, identity and wellbeing.
You can’t put a dollar value on everything
Traditional hazard modelling has become increasingly sophisticated at estimating financial loss.
Researchers can calculate the likely cost of damaged houses, roads, infrastructure and productive land.
But those calculations become far more difficult when the asset at risk is an ancestral burial ground or a place connecting generations of whānau to their tūpuna.
Rangitāne General Manager Corey Hebberd says economic loss represents only one dimension of what could disappear.
For iwi, the deeper concern is what happens to identity, history and connection to place when culturally significant whenua is damaged or lost.
Earth Sciences New Zealand project lead Dr Shaun Williams says the research represents the first time in Aotearoa that cultural loss has been meaningfully and measurably represented within a hazard model.
The model can connect the severity of flooding with potential consequences including disruption of ancestral connections, impacts on urupā and the loss of mahinga kai.
That provides decision-makers with information that goes beyond the conventional dollar value attached to land.
Rangitāne back at the decision-making table
The research also arrives at an important moment for Te Pokohiwi o Kupe.
A new agreement with the Department of Conservation recognises Rangitāne as the administering body for the site, providing iwi with a meaningful role in managing the whenua for the first time in generations.
The flood model will now help inform those decisions.
That could include practical measures such as erosion mitigation, restoration planting, monitoring and determining which culturally significant areas require the greatest protection.
Instead of waiting for climate impacts to occur and responding afterwards, the model allows iwi to identify vulnerabilities and make informed decisions now.
A model that could travel across Aotearoa
The implications extend far beyond Wairau Bar.
Iwi elsewhere are already exploring whether the approach could be adapted to culturally significant sites facing similar environmental threats.
The National Emergency Management Agency has also expressed interest in incorporating mātauranga Māori into wider approaches to understanding hazards and risk.
Natural Hazards Commission Head of Research Dr Natalie Balfour sees particular value in transforming complex hazard science into information communities can actually use when deciding what should be protected and prioritised.
That could become increasingly important as coastal communities confront difficult decisions around adaptation, protection and potentially retreat.
From Wairau to the Pacific
The approach is also attracting interest beyond Aotearoa.
Williams says similar principles are beginning to be applied in Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu, where communities face many of the same questions around climate change, rising seas and the protection of culturally significant places.
For Pacific peoples, climate adaptation cannot always be reduced to moving buildings or calculating the replacement value of infrastructure.
Land can carry genealogy, spirituality, identity and collective memory.
Losing whenua can therefore mean losing something that cannot simply be rebuilt somewhere else.
Science and mātauranga working together
The Wairau project demonstrates what can happen when mātauranga Māori is not treated as an optional cultural addition to scientific research but as a knowledge system capable of changing what researchers measure in the first place.
Climate models can tell communities where the water could go.
Mātauranga and intergenerational experience can help explain what will be lost if it gets there.
Together, they create a considerably richer picture of risk.
And as climate change forces communities across Aotearoa to make increasingly difficult decisions about what can be defended, adapted or relocated, that distinction will matter.
Because when an ancestral landscape disappears beneath the water, the loss cannot be calculated only in hectares, houses or dollars.
For tangata whenua, the calculation must also include whakapapa, identity, taonga and the connections between generations that make a place home.
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