The provocative words left out of a plan to save Westport

Saturday, 1 February 2025

About 500 homes were inundated in Westport during floods in 2021. The town is now bracing itself for the idea that it could have to be moved to avoid further such events.

Climate change. Managed retreat.

The two terms are conspicuous by their absence from a key plan on the future of Westport, one designed to help shape how the West Coast town might grow safely in the future and avoid the worst ravages of a warming world.

And there are good reasons why, the authors say - they want to avoid unnecessary arguments.

Snodgrass Rd, here pictured flooded in July 2021, is not included in the physical flood protection works.

The Westport master plan is a Government-funded hazard and community development planning document, created in response to flooding in 2021 and 2022.

In the face of harsher weather and rising sea levels, it involves a plan for Westport to grow in areas that are less exposed to natural hazards - including moving the town to higher ground away from the Buller River.

The proposal involves Government transferring seed funding and a large parcel of Pāmu (Landcorp) land near Westport to a new legal entity, which would work with private investors to build a new settlement, similar to how the Hobsonville airbase was transferred to the Hobsonville Land Company, a subsidiary of what was Housing New Zealand that successfully developed Hobsonville Point.

It was written by architecture, landscape and urban design company Isthmus after a series of design workshops attended by about 160 Westport residents.

Helen Kerr, the firm’s principal landscape architect and urban designer, said they came up with a vocabulary for talking about the future of Westport to flip the perspective from despair and having no option to one of hope and choice.

Kerr said the community needed to believe in and have ownership over the vision, rather than it being something imposed on them.

At the centre of the process was finding a common language to have a conversation and explore open-ended possibilities.

Flooding in Westport in mid-July 2021. (Video first published in July 2021)

“A lot of this has been about finding the right language and also what the wrong language might be… ‘Managed retreat’ is not a [term] we’re using at all in this process. It’s not even really a thing, there’s no precedent for it.

“We use ‘relocation’ instead of ‘managed retreat’, for example - so, swapping words out. ‘Hope’ not ‘risk’, ‘choice’ not ‘solution’, ‘adaptation’ not ‘resilience’. These are all things we learned along the way.

“‘Change’, not ‘climate change’, and ‘growth’, not ‘development’.”

Kerr said there was a diverse range of people in the design workshops, which explored difficult topics like how to create a new town centre away from the river.

“We’re focusing on the solutions. It’s a better way to have a conversation about what a safe and secure future might look like and what’s at risk.

“We’ve asked people to project themselves 50 years into the future by thinking about being a good ancestor.”

Isthmus urban designer David Irwin said while Westport had a hazard list “a mile high”, residents should feel like they were in control.

People feared the idea of managed retreat because if they had a house on the “wrong side” of a line on a map then their values, capital investment, house and future would be gone.

“For the Westport community that’s real, so the words became so super important. We really haven’t done this before where the words have been such a big deal,” he said.

Irwin said using the term “climate change” was instantly polarising.

“It’s not like we’ve got a whole lot of climate deniers, it’s just you say that and the next minute you’ve got an argument that you didn’t need to have.

“It’s not smoke and mirrors. We’re not hiding anything through using different words. We’re just removing the debate that isn’t actually the point.”

Then prime minister Chris Hipkins announces flood protection funding for Westport in May 2023.

Paul Zaanen, the master plan project lead, said the 160 people on the design workshop’s reference groups were supporters of relocating away from risks, “very adversarial to change” and everyone in between.

“Everybody has this fight or flight instinct that kicks in. They either don’t want to talk about it, or they want to challenge the data, the information, because it’s such an emotional context for people. This is their communities, it’s their neighbours.

“The approach here is looking at the opportunities for growth and betterment in the district, while essentially building a lifeboat at the same time.”

Buller mayor Jamie Cleine said some Westport residents would have to relocate in the long term, particularly those whose homes appeared not to be protected by the proposed flood walls like Snodgrass Rd and areas of Carters Beach, which are currently being built.

“The master plan is how we allow the growth in the right places. It’s not ‘up sticks’, but for some people it’ll mean relocation.”

Cleine said there was more division about the flood wall scheme than about relocation.

“There’s no losers in the master plan. Why wouldn’t you plan for growth?”