National climate centre - new initiative by NIWA

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The establishment of a National Climate Centre for Monitoring and Prediction to become fully operational by early July was announced today by NIWA (the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research).

"The centre will produce climate summaries and climate forecasts out to one year in advance based on our knowledge of the El Nino/La Nina weather phenomenon and its effects on New Zealand. Computer and World Wide Web technologies will allow the generation and dissemination of high-quality maps and analyses.

"We are currently putting in place the structure and personnel required for this service.

"Climate predictions inherently have only limited accuracy. But when coupled with historical risk information and current-monitoring data, they can materially help reduce uncertainties for managers and policy makers and therefore lead to better decisions and reduced losses.

"The new challenge is to use this information to manage for ongoing climate variability, rather than simply reacting to extreme climatic events when they occur.

"We are now talking with the Government in respect of expenditure requirements and will look to a combination of our own resources, public good funding, and commercial activities to establish a financial base for this new service.

"It is a measure of the Foresight Project’s contribution that representations by sectors of society including those of farmers, regional councils, urban and national authorities allowed us to clearly identify expressed community needs for such a centre.

"The droughts, floods and other forms of climate variability that are a dominant feature of New Zealand life have significant impacts on human safety and well being, on the environment and on sustainable land management generally.

"But the economic impacts extend well beyond the agriculture and horticulture sectors, and their downstream rural and processing operations. Nationally important sectors such as energy production, construction, transportation and tourism are all affected.

"They further accumulate in aggregate economic factors such as GDP and national exports, with resulting implications for the country’s economic policy."

Recent statistics produced by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry placed the cost to the economy of weather events over the past two years, and further downstream impacts yet to come, in the range of $3 billion to $4 billion.

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