Parties lay out climate adaptation plans at Wellington conference

Representatives from National, Labour, the Greens, the Opportunity Party, New Zealand First and ACT presented their climate adaptation policies at the Aotearoa Society of Adaptation Professionals conference at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington on 20 August 2026 (RNZ). The cross-party panel, co-branded with RUA, was part of the ASAP|RUA annual conference programme, which ran across 20–21 August (Wellington Scoop).

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, who is also a registered paramedic, spoke for National. He said the party's focus is on practical steps, planning ahead, and giving New Zealanders certainty about the future. Watts pointed to the National Adaptation Framework as a long-term approach to help communities prepare for climate change impacts. He said that if re-elected, National would develop national standards for river gravel extraction and other on-farm quarrying to make resilience projects easier to carry out.

Labour's climate change spokesperson Deborah Russell stood in for her party. She told the conference that leader Chris Hipkins would announce a climate adaptation policy 'in due course'. Russell outlined the funding approach Labour is working towards: a combination of beneficiary pays (those who benefit from adaptation work contribute), exacerbator pays (those who contribute to the problem pay more), and public pays (government funding), involving both central and local government, plus engagement with banks and insurance companies.

Russell also pointed to groundwork she said the previous Labour government had laid. That government commissioned a report from an expert working group on managed retreat — the planned relocation of communities away from areas at high risk from climate impacts such as flooding or sea-level rise. The current government set that report aside. She noted that Parliament's Finance and Expenditure committee carried out an inquiry into climate adaptation that the government largely ignored. Russell added that an independent reference group set up by the government recommended that the beneficiary of any climate adaptation work should pay.

The conference appearance gave each party a platform to position itself on adaptation ahead of the 2026 general election, but what was on offer varied in depth. National arrived with specific commitments tied to the National Adaptation Framework and regulatory changes around gravel extraction. Labour sent a spokesperson rather than its leader and deferred its full policy announcement, while pointing to institutional work it says the current government has shelved.

The broader context here is that adaptation has historically sat below mitigation (reducing emissions) in the political priority hierarchy, partly because the costs are spread out and the beneficiaries are often not yet born. The Finance and Expenditure committee inquiry Russell referenced, and the managed retreat working group report, are both products of an earlier cycle of attention. The fact that both were set aside by the current government, as Russell tells it, raises the question of whether any adaptation framework can survive a change of government, or whether the policy area is structurally vulnerable to the electoral cycle.

Watts's pitch for national standards on river gravel extraction is niche but telling. Gravel management sits at the intersection of flood resilience, roading infrastructure, and rural consenting, and has been a source of friction between councils and landowners. Committing to national standards would centralise what is currently a fragmented regional-council function, with implications for both the pace and consistency of resilience work. Whether that becomes a campaign commitment with wider visibility, or remains a conference-room detail, will depend on how National frames its broader adaptation offering.

For Labour, the gap between Russell's conceptual outline and a delivered policy is the immediate vulnerability. The beneficiary-pays, exacerbator-pays, public-pays triad is a funding framework, not a policy programme. Until Hipkins fills in the detail, Labour's adaptation pitch is an architecture without a building.

The Greens, the Opportunity Party, New Zealand First and ACT each had their own positions to present on the panel. The Greens have flagged tax reform, protecting waterways, and energy reform as their first three headline policies for the 2026 election (Green Party). The Opportunity Party has announced its party list for the 2026 election (Opportunity Party, Facebook). Labour's wider 2026 policy priorities include making healthcare more affordable, cutting the cost of getting around, growing the economy, and delivering results (Labour Party).

The conference itself is the annual gathering of the Aotearoa Society of Adaptation Professionals, co-branded with RUA, and this year brought together practitioners, policymakers, and political figures across two days at Te Papa. The programme was published in late July (ASAP, LinkedIn).

What the panel made clear is that adaptation is now firmly on the election-year agenda, but the distance between shared acknowledgment of the problem and agreed, durable policy solutions is still considerable. National is offering practical regulatory steps. Labour is promising more detail. The other parties have their own contours to fill in. Voters and practitioners alike are left waiting to see which commitments survive the campaign intact.