Scientists Warn Funding Cuts Leave New Zealand Blind to Extreme Weather Risks

New Zealand’s ability to understand and predict extreme weather events is being undermined by a wave of funding cuts that have driven specialist climate scientists overseas, researchers are warning.

A group of senior climate scientists has published a stark warning that research capacity in New Zealand is shrinking at exactly the moment the country needs it most. The warning comes as communities from Northland to the South Island continue to grapple with the aftermath of increasingly severe weather events that have caused billions of dollars in damage over the past several years.

Professor Dave Frame of the University of Canterbury, who co-authored the warning alongside University of Waikato senior lecturer Luke Harrington and Earth Sciences New Zealand researcher Suzanne Rosier, said the timing of the cuts could not be worse. “Just as the costs of extreme weather are becoming more and more apparent, our ability to understand and inform adaptation actions has diminished,” Frame said, in comments published by RNZ.

The research capacity being lost has been built over decades. Two major Endeavour Fund research programmes totalling $25 million have wound up in recent years, and the Deep South National Science Challenge — a flagship government-funded programme — has also come to an end. The cumulative effect has been a hollowing out of specialist expertise that researchers say will take years to rebuild, if indeed the funding environment shifts sufficiently to make rebuilding possible.

Among the most significant losses has been a cohort of climate modellers who worked at Earth Sciences New Zealand, the Crown Research Institute. Around 90 roles were disestablished at the organisation in recent years, and many of those researchers have since relocated overseas. Lucy Stewart, co-president of the Association of Scientists, said the departure of these specialists represented a lasting blow to New Zealand’s science infrastructure. “A lot of those climate modellers have gone, they’ve moved overseas, because they were disestablished,” she said.

The broader context is sobering. Across the science sector as a whole, approximately 700 people have been lost due to recent funding cuts and restructuring. The loss of institutional knowledge — the accumulated expertise of researchers who spent careers focused on New Zealand’s specific climate systems — is not something that can easily be replaced by recruiting generalist climate scientists from overseas.

The scale of the funding challenge becomes clearer when the numbers are examined closely. Of the $463 million distributed through the Endeavour Fund for climate-related projects since 2010, only $4.9 million — spread across just six Marsden Fund grants — was specifically directed at understanding New Zealand’s climate extremes. The rest went to broader climate science, adaptation planning, and related fields, leaving the specific task of modelling what extreme events will look like in a New Zealand context remarkably underfunded relative to the country’s exposure to weather-related risk.

This matters because extreme weather is not uniform. The interaction between snowpack and rainfall, the behaviour of atmospheric rivers over New Zealand’s mountain ranges, the compounding effects of sea level rise and storm surge — these are highly localised phenomena that require locally-focused research. Generic global climate models cannot substitute for the granular, regional knowledge that New Zealand-based scientists have spent years developing.

The government has redirected approximately $122 million toward “advancing technologies” over the next two to three years, with a focus on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing. The shift reflects a deliberate policy choice to prioritise economic productivity research over environmental science, a move critics argue leaves the country without the tools it needs to adapt to a changing climate.

Science Minister Penny Simmonds defended the government’s investment record, pointing to $170 million spent annually on climate-related research. She also indicated that the forthcoming Weather Forecasting Bill — which would allow Earth Sciences New Zealand to absorb MetService — could create efficiencies that free up resources for climate science. The government argues the consolidation would reduce duplication and allow both organisations to focus on their core strengths.

Researchers remain unconvinced that the merger will fill the gap left by dedicated extreme weather science funding. Frame also highlighted another obstacle facing the field — its image. Desk-based computational research does not capture the public imagination the way fieldwork does. “Some nerd sitting in an office doing some advanced Python while a computer blinks at them doesn’t seem quite so cool,” he said. The observation reflects a genuine challenge in building public and political support for research that is fundamentally about processing enormous datasets and running complex simulations rather than scaling glaciers or tracking penguin colonies.

The stakes, however, are anything but abstract. New Zealand has experienced a succession of damaging weather events in recent years, from the floods and landslides that devastated Hawke’s Bay during Cyclone Gabrielle to successive atmospheric rivers battering the west coast. The economic costs of these events run into the billions of dollars, and the human toll — in lives, livelihoods, and community wellbeing — is immense.

Without a robust pipeline of extreme weather research, New Zealand risks making critical decisions about coastal development, infrastructure investment, and emergency preparedness based on outdated or insufficient science. The knowledge lost through researcher departures and programme wind-downs cannot simply be replaced by redirecting a budget line in a future funding round.

For a country as exposed to the forces of the Pacific as New Zealand — sitting at the intersection of competing weather systems, with long coastlines, mountainous terrain, and communities in flood-prone valleys — the ability to accurately model and predict extreme weather is not an academic exercise. It is a basic requirement for sound long-term planning that keeps people and communities safe.

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