Opinion: Change to our built environment is coming, and not only are we not ready, we’re spending money trying to avoid the inevitable

Major climate change adaptation measures are looming for New Zealand, including relocating whole communities, but psychologically and emotionally we are clinging to the sites and structures we have, instead of preparing to move on.

The New Zealand Climate Change Commission, He Pou a Rangi, released its latest report on 11 August. On page three it states that “the work underway is not enough to make the country resilient to current pressures, let alone into future decades”. New Zealand’s current focus is on reacting and recovering, rather than preparing, it says. This costs about $4 billion a year, diverting money from other uses at a rate the report describes as “becoming increasingly unsustainable as climate risks and impacts continue to grow”.

We urgently need to shift into preparation and adaptation, readying people for more extreme weather, community and infrastructure relocations to more liveable and sustainable areas, and changes to existing habits and lifestyles. But the Climate Change Commission report notes that “the foundations for effective adaptation need to be completed first”.

We recently published refereed research in the international journal GeoHumanities on a key plank in those foundations: psychological and emotional acceptance of the need to change. We explored two case studies of communities stuck in a preservation mindset. One was the flooding along the Brisbane River in Queensland. The other was Wellington’s waterfront, where millions of dollars are being spent to refurbish buildings that face long-term risks from sea-level rise, sea wall collapse and earthquake liquefaction.

There’s a concept in postcolonial studies called ‘heritage dissonance’. It refers to the way that a heritage label may imply deep cultural significance for a relatively recent building or structure, while subordinating the area’s pre-colonial history. Heritage mechanisms use a colonial timescale, overwriting much longer histories of land-human relationships with celebration of recent Pākehā milestones.

Wellington’s Central Library, Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui, which, despite being only 30 years old, was listed as a Category 1 Heritage building in 2021, is an example.

The library site was once part of the harbour. It was created by reclamation in the 1880s but will always remain culturally embedded in a precolonial land-and-waterscape containing freshwater, tidal habitats, fish, birds and plant resources stewarded by the communities of Te Aro Pā and Kumutoto Pā. It also remains vulnerable to sea level rise.

Despite Pākehā emotional attachments to the building, it would have made more economic and logistical long-term sense to build a new library elsewhere, perhaps with some of the best-loved features such as the palm tree columns relocated, than continue to patch the existing structure. But Wellingtonians’ love of the existing building—our emotional response—muddies that difficult rationalisation.

Our research focussed on what might make people in flood-prone or other vulnerable areas more willing to let go of their attachments to the existing built environment and consider other options. Specifically, we explored a millennia-old method that societies have used to prepare individuals and communities for moving past loss and embracing change: ritual. Using ethnographic data from a ritual-based, five-day participatory art installation, I’m Y(e)arning For Something, at The Performance Arcade, New Zealand’s largest experimental art festival, we examined the emotional challenges communities face and the role of artistic ritual in creating the emotional and mental states that support built environment climate adaptation.

Our research shows how artistic ritual can create temporary spaces in which communities acknowledge, process and symbolically release attachments to unsustainable places. It argues that embedding ritualised, participatory art practices into formal adaptation planning could strengthen community readiness for transformational change and improve the social legitimacy of difficult decisions. We concluded that artistic ritual constitutes a low‑cost but powerful cultural technology for crossing the emotional thresholds of climate adaptation. Awarding a heritage label is already itself a form of ritual, but one that celebrates continuity of a very recent timescale. Other forms of ritual can help us see a bigger picture, in which it is easier to embrace change.

Ritual is effective as a change agent because humanity’s resistance to adaptation is typically not driven by objective need, but by emotions such as anxiety and nostalgia. Loss aversion means people resist moving on because giving something up feels like a loss, even when the alternative is better. In climate adaptation, this helps explain why people may reject changes to their built environment and long for things to stay the same.

At I’m Y(e)arning For Something, we asked two questions: What are your stories of climate change from where you live? and What do you feel you are you losing? We prompted the conversations using artistic methods: poetry readings, participatory slam poetry workshops, dance, performance art, communal knitting, tea ceremonies and a virtual reality show. These activities disrupted people’s usual mode of engagement with climate change, creating conditions for them to think and feel differently.

Then, we listened openly and without judgement to people’s answers, noticing that they could not separate climate change facts from their feelings of fear, disappointment or anger. Indeed, the literature shows that facts alone are rarely decisive drivers of public opinion in moments of major change, because facts never arrive separately from emotions. Effective climate adaptation therefore depends not only on evidence, planning and infrastructure, but also on emotional readiness – and it’s here that artists have a key role to play.

We have long known that a key function of art is based in ritual. Greek theatre, for example, originated in temple rituals asking for good harvests. What may have been forgotten is how useful ritual practices remain in moments of urgent change and adaptation. Art is deeply entangled with rituals of unmaking, grieving, mourning and letting go. Indeed, we perform rituals all the time: weddings, funerals, unveilings, graduations. They are not ‘ancient’ but a very contemporary and continuing way that we manage life’s big transitions. Performing ritual not only helps people let go; it can also generate new ways of seeing, being and doing. Yet these kinds of practices are entirely absent from the policies and plans of civic bodies and governmental institutions responding to climate change.

One of the Climate Change Commission’s key recommendations is that “central government embeds climate change into key pieces of legislation”. The report only specifies legislation that governs the natural and built environments. Our finding is that adaptation policy also needs to address the human and cultural dimensions of change.

Despite growing literature on the prevalence and immobilising nature of climate grief, urban planning and adaptation recommendations continue to privilege technocratic solutions. They ignore the ways that ritualised, collective mourning practices could help communities process irreversible losses of places, species, livelihoods and identities, and build adaptive capacity.

Publicly funded art focussed on specific psychologies of transition needs to be part of climate adaptation policy now, or we will continue to waste money patching the past instead of embracing a purpose-built future.

Professor Elspeth Tilley is a Professor in Creative Communication in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University.

Simone Gabriel, Ngāti Raukawa, is a doctoral student in Creative Communication in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University.