Auckland prepares for climate change realities
Auckland’s emergency response teams are preparing for the realities of climate change, considering potentially life saving options such as leaving air conditioned libraries open for longer during heatwaves.
But when it comes to stopping climate change from getting worse, figures show our biggest city is way off target.
Aidan Milner, a hazard and warning adviser at Auckland Emergency Management, says heat has not always been top of mind for civil defence organisations, but that has changed.
He is part of a national heat reference group including scientists, the Ministry of Health and emergency managers.
“Heat is a novel hazard for the emergency management sector because we’ve traditionally focused on the likes of geohazards and utility failure but we’ve really started to realise that maybe heat is going to be a bigger problem than we anticipated here in New Zealand.”
One study Auckland Council commissioned showed built-up areas with little greenery could be 3 degrees Celsius hotter than surrounding areas.
FFS! How on earth has the reality of climate change and extreme heat not been factored into all the recent building?
Terraced houses in Auckland overheating due to poor design, demands for Building Code fix
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- Some of Auckland’s terraced houses are overheating, causing discomfort and potential health issues.
- Large windows, poor ventilation, and lack of shade are primary causes, not insulation, experts say.
- A resident of a house that overheats every hot day tells the Herald living in her home is like being in “an oven”.
…we’ve managed to build ovens, not houses!
How the Christ, on a burning planet, have newly built houses been so poorly designed that they are acting as ovens and dangerously over heating residents???
HOW CAN THAT HAPPEN ON A BURNING PLANET?
How can poor design turn houses into Ovens?
And what is the Minister’s bumbling response?
Oh it’s an insulation problem!
WTF?
But Penk’s speculation the stricter insulation requirements were causing overheating has been dismissed by experts who spoke to the Herald. The Green Building Council said rolling back H1 standards “goes against global best practice”.
Insulation doesn’t work that way – The Minister’s bumbling bullshit panicked response is because he’s here to deregulate the building codes when it is this exact lack of oversight that has built houses that fucking cook the people inside them!
This is why I am so cynical of ACTs Regulatory Standards Bill, we need MORE oversight and MORE State capacity to police that oversight to avoid building houses that roast the people inside them FFS!
Allowing a Corporate Body to prevent legislation based on a narrow interpretation of property rights as the only rights creates houses built that operate like ovens – that’s the fucking free market at work!
We need actual regulatory oversight and the ability to properly police that housing build to ensure homes that are heat proof, water tight and healthy!
Watching National try to respond to more mishaps caused by a lack of oversight by proposing even less oversight will be exciting.
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Why are we allowed to build houses where you cant open a window .I am sure the $20 cost for hinges and a catch on a window will not stop a housing project .Basic human right to fresh air ,when was that legislated against .
But if they have opening windows they won’t need to have air conditioning going 24/7 using privately produse and over priced power, opening windows means you have to have space in between house to allow it therefore stopping doners ability to built more house on a single piece of land… etc etc… In other words… its all connected.
When Labour was in power, it insisted on much more energy-efficient houses be built, for good reasons.
Nothing more energy efficient than a home without draughts or windows to let the expensive heat out.
Business is very good at finding ways to rort well-intended regulations. It’s hard to know what to make of that fact. Is it just that NZ has unusually poor business ethics and that has something to do with our colonial, opportunist culture? Or is it more fundamental, i.e. that the profit motive is just intrinsically corrupting?
@ Whatever yada-yada ada. Have you asked your zionist mates to stop bombing starving kids yet BTW?
Thought not. Moving on then:
You write ” When Labour was in power”
What ‘Labour’ ? Or do you mean that wing of neoliberalism that calls itself ‘Labour’?
As usual you fly in the face of fact based evidence hoping that our intellectual largesse gives way to your opinions gaining purchase in our exhausted minds. Before any political curative can be administered we have to entertain the presence of the enemy. Sun Tzu. ” Know your enemy.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy-and-know-yourself-you-need
and all that.
People. ‘Labour’ isn’t that. It’s just a gaggle of weedy sycophants to Big australian Banking and the mythical ‘free market’ is just that. A myth.
Read this then pass it around.
TDB
Tadhg Stopford – NZ is not poor. We are being plundered.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2025/05/07/guest-blog-tadhg-stopford-nz-is-not-poor-we-are-being-plundered/?utm_source=pocket_shared
And this by George Monbiot and read the book.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/29/the-invisible-doctrine-by-george-monbiot-and-peter-hutchison-review-neoliberalisms-ascent?utm_source=pocket_shared
So yeah @ ada. Thus fuck off then.
“[Penk’s] here to deregulate the building codes when it is this exact lack of oversight that has built houses that fucking cook the people inside them.”
Well said – that’s a very concise summary of the criminally greedy folly that is at play here. The same greedy folly that gave us leaky homes under a previous Nat government. Absolutely everything they do is about giving free gifts to business (deregulation, lower wages, tax cuts) to increase private sector profitability at the expense of everyone else.
For decades, New Zealand has focussed on building thermally-efficient housing with insulation, airflow resuction, double-glazing, and plenty of windows to provide passive solar heating of a concrete floor slab. You see and hear it in the constant repetition of the catchphrase “warm dry houses”.
This has resulted in the creation of a generation of airtight, heat-retaining, heat-absorbing boxes. When you build with one aim in mind, you get that aim.