Māori climate risk intensified by colonization

colonization intensifies – A new 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment for Aotearoa New Zealand says colonization has intensified climate risks for Māori communities, worsening inequities through exclusion from decision-making and chronic underinvestment. The assessment urges Māo

For Māori communities across Aotearoa New Zealand, severe weather is no longer arriving as a single disaster.

It can start with flooding. then cut off access to mahinga kai. damage a marae. and surge through already strained health and welfare systems.. The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment released earlier this month frames that reality in stark terms: climate change is likely to deepen inequities that were shaped by colonization. exclusion from decision-making. and chronic underinvestment.

The assessment is made up of four reports, including a companion document focused on Māori communities.. That companion report argues that what happens to the land. health. and culture of Māori communities is inseparable from the history of aggressive settlement.. It also says mitigation will only work if adaptation is led by Māori.

“ For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonization process,” said Paora Tapsell, who is Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, and the director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University.

The findings land as the country has just endured one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across New Zealand’s two islands. The report adds that Māori communities are essential in responding to such disasters.

“The report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga [Māori settlements], despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the frontline of increasingly severe climate events,” said Shaun Awatere, who is Ngāti Porou and lead author of the companion report.

Tapsell and Awatere’s comments put a human face on what the assessment lays out across seven interconnected risk areas—environmental. cultural. and economic.. It warns that the loss of protected endemic species is not just a biodiversity crisis.. The report says it would also affect food gathering places. the Māori lunar calendar. traditional customs. and intergenerational knowledge systems.

Under high-emissions scenarios, the assessment says some species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of the country by 2090.

Across Māori lands, the impacts are also described in physical terms that ripple into identity and memory.. The assessment says climate-driven extreme weather events have already had a destructive impact on infrastructure. and it outlines how flooding. erosion. storms. and wildfires bring cultural risks by threatening tribal meeting places. burial sites. and communal homes.

Repeated damage and displacement, the report warns, could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral land.

It is not only heritage that is at stake.. The assessment says climate impacts may increase pressure on Māori-owned forestry. farming. aquaculture. and horticulture enterprises. citing rising pressure from climate hazards. costs. and underinvestment in adaptation.. Without structural reform and targeted support, it says economic vulnerability will increase.

Awatere’s description ties the disasters together in a way that sounds familiar to communities that have watched events chain into each other.

“Climate events do not arrive one at a time,” he said.. “A storm floods a road. damages a marae [tribal meeting place]. erodes whenua [land]. disrupts access to mahinga kai [food gathering places]. and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched. all at once.. Each of those harms compounds the next.”

The assessment also raises the risk that displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practices, lineage relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations.

What separates this report from warnings that stop at environmental outcomes is its focus on how policy decisions shape exposure and recovery.. It highlights ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems. despite the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi. which is the country’s founding document.. The companion report describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding climate impacts across all domains.

Awatere said the central question for adaptation planning is whether it will reflect the evidence already laid out by communities—or whether Māori communities will continue to carry a disproportionate risk of harm.

The new national assessment adds to a growing body of climate reporting that connects colonial policy to present-day vulnerability.. In 2023, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment found that land theft and colonization exacerbated the impact of climate change.. The year before. Australia’s State of the Environment report was prepared with an Indigenous lead author for the first time; it found that Indigenous peoples were more likely to be impacted by extreme weather events like fires. and it called for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into climate policies.

Despite those findings, Indigenous leaders around the world say national governments are still not listening to them.

The 2026 risk assessment points to Māori-led adaptation as uniquely effective. It calls for policy grounded in Māori customs and knowledge, Indigenous data sovereignty, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making.

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