A new climate report says colonisation has intensified Māori exposure to climate risk, degrading whenua and taonga while worsening impacts on health, housing, and wellbeing.
That’s according to Paora Tapsell (Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa), Professor and Director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University.
Dr Shaun Awatere (Ngāti Porou), Kaihautū Research Impact Leader at the Bioeconomy Science Institute, says the National Climate Change Risk Assessment findings confirm what hapū and iwi have been managing for years.
“Climate events do not arrive one at a time. A storm floods a road, damages a marae, erodes whenua, disrupts access to mahinga kai, and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched, all at once. Each of those harms compounds the next,” Awatere says.
The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment (NCCRA) is a comprehensive assessment of climate-related risks across Aotearoa New Zealand. It comprises four reports, including a companion report titled Ngā mea hirahira o te ao Māori, which provides a kaupapa Māori assessment of seven national climate risks affecting iwi and Māori communities.
Unlike the 2020 assessment, the latest report explicitly identifies Māori as facing disproportionately severe and interconnected climate impacts.
Awatere is lead author of the companion report and notes Aotearoa has recently experienced one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across both islands.
The report frames climate change as more than an environmental issue. It argues it is likely to deepen existing inequities shaped by colonisation, exclusion from decision-making, and chronic underinvestment in Māori communities.
“For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonisation process,” Paora Tapsell adds.
“The Report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga, despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the frontline of increasingly severe climate events.”
The report’s seven interconnected risk areas span environmental, cultural, and economic domains.
It says the loss of taonga species is not only a biodiversity issue, but also affects mahinga kai, maramataka, tikanga, and intergenerational knowledge systems. Some taonga species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of Aotearoa under high-emissions scenarios by 2090.
Climate impacts on infrastructure are also framed as cultural risks. Flooding, erosion, storms, and wildfires threaten marae, urupā, and papakāinga. The report warns repeated damage, and displacement could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral whenua.
Economically, Māori-owned forestry, farming, aquaculture, and horticulture enterprises face rising pressure from climate hazards, costs, and underinvestment in adaptation. Without structural reform and targeted support, vulnerability is expected to increase over the coming century.
The report also highlights risks to tikanga, hapū and iwi identity, and mātauranga Māori. Climate-driven displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practice, whakapapa relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations.
Awatere stresses that governance is identified as a key concern. The report highlights ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems, despite Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations. It describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding impacts across all domains.
He says the central question is whether future adaptation will reflect that evidence, or whether Māori communities will continue to carry disproportionate risk without structural change.
Alongside these risks, the report points to Māori-led adaptation as central to the response. It calls for approaches grounded in tikanga, mātauranga Māori, and Te Tiriti-consistent governance, including support for iwi and hapū-led restoration, Indigenous data sovereignty, community-based resilience planning, regenerative land and marine management, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making.
It argues current policy settings remain fragmented and insufficient for the scale of risk identified.
