Analyses of climate change-related flooding hazards and related impacts on individual residential property values require an understanding of multiple uncertainties. Uncertainties can arise from the climate change scenarios used, methodological choices (including elevation models, inundation models and damage functions used) and from the data used (e.g. temporal groundwater variation). We will present the results of modelling these uncertainties as part of the STRAND project, an interdisciplinary Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden project (2021 - 2024) involving the University of Otago, Griffith University, Bodeker Scientific, GNS, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, CoreLogic, NeSI, NIWA and RiskScape. It was found that large cumulative uncertainties were generated for the case study area, with the magnitude of uncertainty increasingly rapidly into the second half of this century. Within the modelled uncertainty, architecture choices dominate over scenario choice. The spatial differences (extent and distribution) of flooding risks were particularly pronounced in the choice of hydrogeological model (empirical observation-based groundwater vs elevation-based bathtub model architecture). Most interesting is the non-linear relationship between rate of sea-level-rise and flooding risk, with the relative prominence of different uncertainty choices changing over time.
Speaker: Ivan Diaz-Rainey is a leading international expert in climate and sustainable finance. He is a Professor of Finance at Griffith University. Previously he has held academic positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand), University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), where he held a Jean Monnet Fellowship, and the Higher Colleges of Technology (Abu Dhabi, UAE). His research expertise includes climate finance, carbon markets, energy finance, banking, financial regulation, green Fintech and energy and environmental policy. His research has been published in leading international journals, including Climatic Change, Energy Economics, International Review of Financial Analysis, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting and The Energy Journal. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation & Compliance and the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment and is on the Editorial Board of the Climate Policy journal. He has conducted research, policy and consultancy work for a number of organisations, including the Boston Consulting Group, EMMI Pty, the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment (MfE), OECD, E.ON UK plc, the European Capital Markets Institute (ECMI), Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI). He is an Honorary Professor (and former lead Principal Investigator) on the STRAND Marsden Fund project (University of Otago).