Why Global Warming will be the Nemesis of New Zealand’s West Coast
Climate Change will lead to more intense rainfall events — and at some point we’re unlikely to keep fixing the road.
Early last year (2019) my mother announced a wish to visit her last close relative — a cousin who lived in Hokitika. This is a town in the north of the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The West Coast is famously wet — this is because it lies to the west of the Southern Alps. These mountains force the weather systems coming from the ocean to the west, upwards to cooler altitudes. In consequence, they dump their moisture as rain. Hokitika, which sits on the coast, is one of the wettest cities in New Zealand, getting about three meters of rain in a year. But inland and upland of Hokitika, the average annual rainfall is over ten meters, making it one of the wettest spots on Earth.
It all sounds very gloomy, but the West Coast also gets a lot of sunshine. That high rainfall tends to come in very intense ‘events’.
