New Zealand spent 72 days under declared states of emergency in 2025, according to Local Government New Zealand data — compared to an annual average of just 13.4 days a decade earlier. That is a five-fold increase, and it is not a statistical accident.
Eighty percent of the emergencies driving that increase were caused by severe weather or flooding. The data, released by LGNZ President and Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz in January, is the clearest summary yet of what is happening to New Zealand's local councils on the front line of climate change: they are absorbing the costs, and the financial and legislative framework has not caught up.
"Decision-makers should now expect responding to an emergency annually," Stoltz said. "Local councils step in to lead response and recovery efforts" — but they are doing so with rate bases already resisting the rises needed for basic maintenance, and with central government funding mechanisms designed for exceptional events rather than annual ones.
The scale of the recent record speaks for itself. In 2023, New Zealand spent 91 days under states of emergency — the highest total ever recorded, driven overwhelmingly by Cyclone Gabrielle's devastating impact on the East Coast, Hawke's Bay, and Auckland. The 2011 total of 88 days was dominated by 67 days from the Christchurch earthquake. What is different now is that the extreme weather events causing emergency declarations are not one-off natural disasters — they are increasingly the baseline.
The five-year average tells the story plainly: 66.6 days under state of emergency annually over the past five years, compared to 13.4 days in the previous decade. New Zealand has moved from emergency declarations as exceptional events to emergency declarations as routine governance.
LGNZ is calling on central government to respond with structural reforms: fast-track rates variation processes for disaster-affected councils, emergency funding mechanisms that reflect the new frequency of events, and minimum standards in the Emergency Management Bill that come with actual central funding rather than unfunded mandates on under-resourced communities.
There is a harder question lurking beneath the policy debate. What is the long-term plan? Managed retreat from flood-prone areas? Tougher rebuild standards? Higher taxes for resilience investment? All of the above? None of these options is politically comfortable. All of them are financially significant. And the longer governments defer the conversation, the more the bill compounds.
New Zealand also faces the insurance question. Private insurers are already recalibrating their exposure to flood-prone and coastal properties. If events keep escalating in frequency and severity, some areas will simply become uninsurable — which means either the government backstops all losses, or property values collapse, or communities are abandoned.
Now bring this story back to the Pacific, because that is where it gets genuinely sobering. If a wealthy, high-institutional-capacity nation like New Zealand — with its own civil defence infrastructure, engineering corps, and fiscal headroom — is struggling to adapt to a five-fold increase in weather emergencies, consider what the same trajectory means for Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and the lower-lying parts of Fiji. Countries with a fraction of the resources, operating without the institutional depth, facing the same physics.
Mate, there is a whole Pacific out there. The LGNZ data matters for New Zealand's domestic politics. It matters more as a preview of what is coming for the region.
