Tauranga is subject to a number of natural hazards such as earthquakes, erosion, extreme rainfall, and tsunami. These natural hazards all have different risks, and all have the potential to affect human life, infrastructure, property and the environment.
As our city grows and considering the influence climate change will have, we need to improve our understanding of these hazards, and ensure that we are looking after our people by sharing our findings.
This means you can understand what risks may be present in our city, a specific area or on an individual property. We also use this information to guide us in making decisions about where and how to build new houses and infrastructure, and how to make our existing houses and infrastructure more resilient. We need to build resilience to potential shock events (aka fast hazards), as well as slower hazards – like erosion – that happen over a long period of time because of changing environments.
We have been researching, mapping, planning for, and informing our community about natural hazards for over 20 years. Since 2016 we have been working in partnership with Western Bay of Plenty District Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council to jointly understand how natural hazards could impact our wider community.
Information about hazards that Tauranga is susceptible to is available on this website and included in Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports. It’s also used in council consenting processes for planning, building and subdivision.
In this section of our website, you will find information on:
- the climate change and sea level rise projections we’re working with to model the effects of natural hazards on the city
- the studies we’re conducting to better understand our natural hazards and their potential effects, and how to access the data that we have collected from these studies to date
- what we’re doing to manage natural hazards as we plan for new developments, and our Infrastructure Resilience Project which looks at how to make our city’s infrastructure and land use more resilient to natural hazards.