Being confined to the house may be safe but it can become very boring and so a project is a great therapy. My daughter has recently moved to Kerikeri and needs a chook house to hold about six or eight chickens. The deciding factor is how many laying boxes are needs and we decided on three and they would be 300mm x 300mm and this decides the length of one side. 
​The overall dimensions are 1000mm wide x 1200mm long and 1000mm to the eaves and 850mm to the  ridge. From then on the design can be sorted out from Pinterest.
A chicken is about 300mm high so we need to accommodate that in the perch and in the nesting box. 
Step one is to get some materials. 

​Our son had some sections of fence which he needed to get rid of and these were broken down to recover the wood.

The first part to build is the floor to the right dimensions and the walls can be made to fit the floor. Make to two ends and put them in position with the ridgepole fitted to hold it steady..

Put up more of the roof joists and make the structure strong. The sides consist of the nesting boxes and the cleaning access door so they can be dealt with later.

I did another drawing of some refinements as the door aperture was too big and it needed some decoration. Here again Pinterest has stacks of ideas to choose from. 

With the structure fairly strong the roof can go on and in this case it was a sheet of ply last used for concrete mixing. It was a bit short and so some extra bits were added to make it fit and the watertightness will be solved by felting the roof later.
​The door aperture was too large and so I got a piece of ply to cover the hole and a doorway cut into that. The advantage is that the door is a feature and can be highlighted a special shape and painted with a different colour scheme.

The chook shed design required it to be on legs and also a pair of wheels to make it moveable.  I wasn't sure about this and did not have an axle so left it to later. The wheels came from a lawnmower repair and these could be bolted to the legs rather than a complete axle so they can be added now.

The door can be fitted to the frame and the access ramp put in position.

A few bits of wood jig sawed to add some decoration can make all the difference to the overall appearance of the project

  There is still the nesting box to be made and quite a lot of finishing to be done including waterproofing the roof, painting and making the nesting boxes but its well on its way.

Chickens need a space of roughly 300mmx300mmx300mm for living space and we need three nesting boxes for eight chickens. The nesting area needs to have easy access and be waterproof so here is what it looks like.  

This is what it looks like .

​Then I put a coat of paint on the roof to protect it and a pretty yellow door and its ready for delivery.

The main advice for avoiding the spread of corona virus is to limit personal contact with other people, especially at large gatherings, such as sports matches and concerts. The increasing use of the internet has actually been doing this for a few years and it may be that corona virus will accelerate this trend.  We sometimes forget that Google has only been in business for 22 years and the internet is still relatively new and not yet fully developed.
The USA has suspended passenger travel between the USA and Europe but there are many business people who need to conduct business between the two continents and if they can’t travel then they will set up Skype or other video service meetings and do business that way. This has been the case for some years and traveling to foreign countries has always been one of the perks of international business but it is expensive and time consuming so companies could insist on employees doing more without a physical visit.

​A big point of personal contact is at work, especially in large offices, and many people have been working from home, either permanently or for several days a week, but if a company was faced with closure how many staff could do their work from home? Once a company finds that it can manage with half or most of its staff at home would they go back to a big office or would they relocate to smaller premises and make the savings?
Doctors are going consultations by Skype to limit infection but we could get used to it and the doctors might find it more efficient and use it more. If we had reliable instruments at home for temperature, blood pressure and a mini electrocardiogram, as we have on a phone app, a diagnosis of simple ailments can be done without a personal visit.
Universities are putting a lot of lectures on line and this Covid19 disruption to education will lead to a big expansion in online learning. Making use of a really good online presentation does not detract from education and can help many students of all ages continue education by not being present in a classroom. It might enable university students get a good degree without the huge expense and debt of attending a university in a faraway city. 

​An increasing number of people are choosing to do their supermarket shopping on the internet and either have the food delivered or collect it from a secure locker at the store. To date most of these people are those that are short of time and do it for convenience but could a supermarket manage with 75% of its customers shopping this way, and if the customers like it would it continue for ever?
If a supermarket did not have to deal with customers would it move to an industrial estate and handle it’s orders like a spare part distributer or like Amazon? We would then have a fleet of small vans driving around the town delivering food. Expanding use of home delivery is why Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric vans from Rivian for last mile deliveries and with a warehouse roof full of solar panels supplying power and eventually autonomous self-driving vans, it would be a cheap delivery service.  It is all part of the growing trend for online shopping

​Attendances at sporting events, exhibitions, cinema and concerts have been falling for years as people have been getting a better experience from online and TV performances, the atmosphere of a live performance is worth going for but watching online will surely continue to grow.
Youngsters are using their phones for social interaction and people date and eventually marry via the internet. This trend towards online interaction has been growing for some years and is just a different form of living which will continue to establish itself in society.
Life is not going to be the same again.

The Covid19 crisis has highlighted a problem for the oil companies that was slowly unfolding but has now gone into overdrive. We passed peak oil somewhere around 2005 but it was hidden by fracking extraction techniques that enabled a lot more oil to be extracted. As a result, we have a had a mild glut of supply for nearly twenty years, particularly from the USA, Canada and Russia and this has kept the price slightly depressed to around $70.
Unlike most other commodity industries there is almost no storage in the system for oil and it relies on a steady progress of one hundred million barrels a day from the wellhead to the user.
Fracking is a more expensive method of extraction and needs a higher oil barrel price to make a profit but, because of the oversupply, some oil wells were making a loss and many were only breaking even. The banks were supporting the losses because most of the costs were in discovery and drilling and it is better to keep pumping and selling the oil than to shut and cap the well.
​Before the Covid19 crisis the demand for oil was already slowly falling and the price was going down and the price had fallen to $30 and now the Corona19 has collapsed demand and the situation is not going to change for some months.
For technical reasons oil wells cannot be switched off and on and, once they are shut and capped, a new well will have to be drilled. Once the storage tanks are full, and at a hundred barrels a day this won’t take long, wells will have to be shut down. Many of the oil fields are almost depleted and are not going to be reopened so there will be an instant loss of capacity.
Clearly the whole oil industry will be under extreme stress and the banking industry that has been supporting them with billions of dollars of loans will also be at risk.
When the world reopens for business and demand increases back to the old rates of consumption I suspect that we may be short of supply and the price could rocket, but whatever happens, nations will want to have a more stable and controllable supply of energy and will enlarge their renewable electricity capacity of wind, solar, geothermal and hydro.
Big changes have been forecast for some time but this is a real ‘black swan’ event and will bring changes that we were not expecting to see in our lifetime.
(A black swan event originates from the northern hemisphere and from a time when the only known swans were white and therefore black swans were not going to happen.)

​Tourism is a major source of income in New Zealand and all regions are chasing the tourist dollar so what can we do to get our fair share. We routinely see articles about Queenstown and sometimes you would think that there was nowhere else in New Zealand worth visiting.
Most tourists arrive by plane into Auckland and from there disperse by plane, bus, car, bike and campervan heading South or North. The majority head South so we need a major, not to be missed, destination in the North to bring them this way and I believe that we have one in the Bay of Islands.
Sixty years ago, long before the internet, when I was in the UK, I knew that the Bay of Islands was one of the most beautiful places on the planet and the iconic name still has a world wide reputation which we can capitalise on. If we could work on this world wide brand name the whole of the Far North would benefit, just as Wanaka and Invercargill benefit from Queenstown.
I manage two websites for walkers, the BOI Walkways and the Kerikeri Five Waterfalls and the BOI one gets six times as many page views as the Kerikeri one which illustrates the power of the Bay of Islands brand name.
We have five small towns in the Bay of Islands each with their own character and with a little bit of tweaking and marketing we could make a package that would be worthy of a ‘must do’ for tourists.
Kawakawa is the most southerly community and has the railway, the cycleway and the Hundertwasser toilets and now has the new tourist information centre which makes the town the gateway to the Bay of Islands. Opua is an excellent marina and yachting centre. Russell is an old and interesting whaling town. Paihia is a tourist centre with beaches and ferries to the islands plus of course about 65 cruise ships and the community has done wonders to promote the town. Kerikeri is the largest town of the group with the heritage areas of the Stone Store and Kororipo Pa plus its vineyards, fresh fruit and vegetables.
Towns do better when they have an identity and recognising these features and amplifying them gives tourists something to believe in, that they are going to see something unique.
These towns, plus the others in Northland, are all working hard to make their towns attractive and fine places to live in but individually they do not have the reach of an existing internationally recognised brand name like the Bay of Islands.
As a start I am trying to link the walking tracks in the BOI area together into a network and promote it as a walkers destination that features the Islands, the rivers and waterfalls, the heritage and environmental beauties into a single holiday  and we will see how it goes. 

​We all know that greenhouse gasses are warming the planet and we have to reduce them, but who is responsible and where can we make savings? The two big sources in New Zealand are burning oil for our transport and methane from cattle in our agricultural industry and they are both at about 40% each of the total.
Our greenhouse gas emissions per head of population are about 6 tonnes per person and this is roughly the same as Europe and China while Australia is about 18 tonnes and the USA at about 22 tonnes while India is down at 2 tonnes. Most developed nations are falling as they convert from coal to gas, solar and wind power for electricity generation, while the poorer nations are increasing as they industrialise.
New Zealand has a very large dairy and cattle industry compared with other countries at around 10 million head of cattle this amounts to 2 head of cattle per person. The UK for instance has around 5 million beasts against 66 million people or 0.08 head per person. If the UK had the same proportion as New Zealand, they would have 122 million head of cattle, but the UK ratio is similar to the rest of Northern Europe. New Zealand is clearly in a league of its own.
The problem for us is the way that we account for the emissions, in that the cows emit here and we have to account for this, even though we export 95% of the milk product. Australia on the other hand exported 380 million tonnes of coal which, when burnt, will make 800 million tonnes of CO2 at 32 tonnes per Australian, and they do not count this against their, already bad figures.
Our dairy and meat produce are all paddock grass fed and of the highest quality and when we export this, we give the recipient country a huge help in their trading emissions account. China for instance is the manufacturing workshop of the world and they have a huge emissions tonnage as they industrialise. We import finished goods from China and do not account for the emissions that they made in the manufacturing and so we should accept the ‘give and take’ in the balance of emissions and manufacturing. We get their manufactured goods emission free and they get our dairy products emissions free.
In my view, we should give the farmers a free pass on the emissions and concentrate on helping them with fencing, to keep cattle out of the streams, and in the longer term move away from cattle farming altogether and concentrate on using our fertile land for more intensive and productive arable and horticultural farming.
We also need to remind ourselves that only about half of the houses in New Zealand are connected to a sewage system and so we need to address that problem if we want to pump drinking water from the aquifers and from our rivers. 

​We need to convert our transport away from oil to electrical power as quickly as possible to stop producing CO2 which is causing climate change and will destroy our way of life.
Is it possible and is it likely?
​
​  Well, incredibly, there is a strong possibility that it is going to happen.
To understand the scale of the problem here are a few figures. We currently have around 1000 million personal cars on the planet and manufacturer about 70 million new cars a year which gives an average lifespan of the fleet around 15 years,

​There are currently less than 1% electric cars in the fleet and relatively very few in production so there is a long way to go. So what has changed that gives this optimism?
Electric cars use high specification Lithium Ion batteries that are expensive and make up a large part of the cars total cost and the battery’s capacity dictates the cars range, so it is the battery that is the deal breaker.
The price of batteries has been dropping rapidly and needs to get below $125 per Kilowatt of storage to be below the cost of petrol for delivering transport competitively.

There are other ways of looking at the same facts and they all point in a downward projection.

The technology in batteries is progressing so quickly that it will certainly be cost competitive against petrol within two or three years, if it has not already done so. The battery in the new Volkswagen iD.3 is reportedly below $100 per Kilowatt hour but that car is only just in production so we will have to wait a year before we find out.
Battery cost is one subject but the sheer volume of car production that is needed to make a difference is huge, but could it be achieved? The two manufacturers who have volume production at the moment are Tesla at around 270,000 a year and Nissan at about 85,000 while the popular Renault Zoe produces 30,000 cars a year and the Hyundai Kona a similar number. If we add in all the other manufacturers, we could be just over 500,000 cars a year.

​What will mark the start of a serious lift in volumes are the huge new factories being opened by Tesla in Shanghai and by Volkswagen in Germany where Tesla are starting with a target production of 300,000 a year which they believe could reach 500,000 and Volkswagen are starting at 300,000 and could reach 330,000.

This is a huge increase in production numbers and we have still not seen any movement by volume manufacturers such as Ford, GM and Toyota and it’s the real metal bashers that can make the difference. They are all pouring financial investments into electric cars but no signs of production yet.
If it all comes together as predicted battery prices will be lower than the comparable cost of petrol transport by about 2022 and hence there will be no point in an oil powered car. The volume car plants will convert to electric cars by about 2025 and we may have converted our entire vehicle fleet by 2040.
It may be earlier because, if we allow autonomous self-driving cars then many people will cease to have personal ownership of a car and therefore, we may not need to replace the whole 1000 million fleet because they would not be needed. 

​​We are so close to the dangerous limit of CO2 in the atmosphere that we are going to overshoot the safe levels and will have to make dramatic changes to maintain our way of life. There is not much that can be done about the population growing to eleven billion because, although we have passed peak birth rate, people are not dying as fast as they used to and it is the survival rate that is increasing the numbers.  Hans Rosling does a very good Youtube explanation of population growth.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg

​So where can we make the changes to manage the planet in a sustainable way and, without a major war, keep everyone going until the population numbers fall naturally at the end of the century. The first step is to stop burning fossil fuels and move to clean (and cheap) renewable energy. We must change our food producing methods so that we can produce more food from the same, or smaller area of land and with much less cattle farming. Stop cutting down forests and start planting native trees for forests that are not going to be felled. Replace iron and cement production with other materials. Stop plundering our oceans for fish and dumping our rubbish in the rivers and sea. Lastly, we must start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to stop the planet heating up.

​The good news is that rapid advances in technology mean that the solutions are available to us now even if they need scaling up of production and getting the production costs right. Transport has largely been solved so that petrol cars can be described as the walking dead, and are being replaced by electric batteries. Burning coal to make electricity is an expensive form of energy and is also on the way out. It is the scale of production of wind, solar and geothermal energy backed up by batteries that is the time limiting factor.  Tony Seba does a very good lecture on the rapid changes in the world.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0

​For those who doubt these changes, we are already using drills and other battery powered electrical tools that are not connected by electrical wire. Laptops are being dropped in favour of tablets. Mobile phones are smaller and longer lasting. Changes are coming very quickly.
There are two technologies that can make a massive difference to our way of life and these are Graphene and MOF’s (Metal Organic Framework’s).

​Graphene is carbon that is made in a sheet one atom thick and is 200 times stronger than steel. It will conduct electricity better than copper, it can be used to transfer electronic data nearly as fast as light, it is so thin that it is nearly transparent and can filter liquids such as sea water to take out impurities or can store hydrogen without leakage for fuel tanks. ( https://www.explainthatstuff.com/graphene.html )
These properties mean graphene can replace steel or aluminium in construction of planes or other vehicles, bridges and any structure needing strength and light weight. It will be used in the next generation of batteries to give increased power and durability for less weight. Imagine a solar/battery driven graphene plane. 

​Metal Organic Frameworks are in a metal powder form that acts like a specialist sponge. It can be made in a form that can absorb water from the atmosphere in a desert and produce clean water for drinking. It can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and then we can split out carbon for use or storage and return oxygen to the atmosphere. (  https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/mofs-find-a-use/2500508.article )

​Both these products are in their early stages but have massive, societal changing capability.

​Food production is not very efficient in many areas and we have degraded and abandoned about 25% of our farmland through erosion and bad practices. There are two ways of improving the conversion of land area to food productivity. One is by producing much more food in greenhouses where the climate is protected and there are no losses from weather and pests. They can be sited on poor quality land and even in deserts. ( https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/sundrop-farms-opens-solar-greenhouse-using-no-fresh-water/7892866 )

​The other area, which may not be so popular. is that we reduce our consumption of meat and dairy and eat alternative products made from vegetables. It takes 60,000 litres of water to make one kilogram of beef and we are running short of good water in many areas. Big improvements have been made in producing food from vegetable matter recently and when a minced beef, made from vegetable products that will make a suitable burger patty, the viability of the dairy sector will be undermined.
 ( https://sunfedfoods.com/ )

​The parts of climate change where there does not appear to be a solution are the state of the oceans, with fish stocks and ocean acidity, with sea level rise and changing weather patterns. All of these are extremely serious but we will have to deal with them while at the same time accommodating millions of people displaced from their homes.

In past times we have had pulses of sea level rise that have seen many metres in a few decades and as we only need one metre for economic and human disaster a lot of research is being done to understand if it could happen again.

n many ways circumstances are very different from those in a previous pulse of sea level rise as we are just past the peak of a warm period. The previous sea level pulses came from the melting of huge land based ice sheets on the North American and Asian continents which have now gone. 

​The only remaining big ice sheets left are on Greenland and Antarctica and they can be divided into four different significant regions with very different circumstances and very different potentials for adding to sea level rise.

Antarctica is split into three regions of which by far the largest is East Antarctica with a potential to add about 60 metres to sea levels.
East Antarctica is fortunately very high and extremely cold so there is no surface melting and most of the ice sits on rock so there is very little melting from underneath except where ice flows move out over the ocean. There is melting from the underneath of ice shelves around the edges and these ice shelves are massive but as they are already in the sea they do not contribute to sea levels.  There is loss of ice but there is also snow falling in greater quantities on the shoulders of the continent and therefore there is only a modest loss of mass balance.

​The Antarctic peninsula is at a warmer latitude and is disintegrating, demonstrated by the ice shelves Larson A and Larson B having suddenly collapsed. The glaciers on the mountains behind these ice shelves have speeded up their progress to the sea, adding to sea level rise. Larson C has recently had a massive calving of 10% of its area and there are more splits in the remaining ice. Once again most of the ice loss is already in the sea and so, at the moment, it is a minor addition to sea level rise. Still all these bits add up and we only need one metre for disaster.

West Antarctica has a whole series of glacier streams of which the Thwaites and Pine Island are the most significant. Global warming has increased the heat differential between the South pole and the tropics and the katabatic winds at the coast are now stronger. As they blow offshore they blow surface water away from the coast and consequently warmer water is sucked up from the deep to replace it. 

​This deep water is relatively warm at +2C and is melting the ice shelf from below and this is where it starts to get interesting.
 
 
The warm water melts the ice from below and as the ice shelf thins it breaks up, just as Larson’s A, B and C have, and the ice shelf retreats. As it gets closer to the coast the ice is sitting on the sea floor and much thicker and higher than floating ice.
Ice is brittle and has a maximum size that it can maintain before it collapses. This would be a cliff face of 90metres above sea level and above that it will collapse. 

​This illustration is the classic profile of a glacier and ice shelf. 

​When the ice shelf retreats due to warm water melting and break up it will eventually reach this thicker ice, and then it will collapse very quickly because it is unstable. This ice will add to sea levels because some of it is not floating.
This process of rapid collapse would quickly get back to land based glacier which, without buttressing support would quickly start slipping into the sea. This scenario could produce a pulse of sea level rise.
The illustration leads you from A to F and shows how the warmer melts the ice from below, when the melting gets past a shallow ridge on the sea floor B the warm water reaches deep behind the ice face C and collapses the floating ice shelf. D + E shows how the retreating ice reaches thicker grounded ice. The last illustration F shows the unstable cliff face of the thicker ice and this is the point of rapid collapse.
​In summary the Antarctic region is currently has a nett loss of 125 gigatons of ice a year which would raise sea levels by 0.3 mm a year. 3 mm a decade does not sound much, but much of the current melting is of ice that is already in the sea, it is accelerating and when the shelve are gone the glaciers behind them will start to slip and they will add significantly towards the one metre disaster level.

Greenland is relatively accessible from the USA and Europe and so it is well researched. It is suffering a whole host of problems partly because it is closer to the warmer latitudes than Antarctica. By comparison Greenland spans from 60 Deg.  to 80 Deg., the North of Scotland is 60 Deg. and the Antarctic Peninsula spans 65 Deg. to 75 Deg.
The central plateau of Greenland is 3000 metres high and up until recently it did not melt but since the late 1990’s it has been melting quite frequently. Some of this is due to rising temperatures but it is made worse by dark soot from industry, aeroplanes and forest fires, covering the clean reflective snow, absorbing heat and encouraging melting. Once the snow has melted it is a darker colour and becomes significantly less reflective and more prone to absorbing heat.
The warm water melts its way down through the ice and forms holes called moulins which carry the water deep into the bed of the ice sheet. This warm water will unstick the ice from the bedrock so that 3-kilometre-thick ice will lurch suddenly towards the ocean. In some cases, the water makes its way to the sea and adds to sea level but in other cases it sits inside the ice as a reservoir of liquid water and may become part of a later pulse in rapid sea level rise
Satellite measurements show that the surface of Greenland is dropping noticeably and the meltwater is adding to sea level rise.
Around the coast of Greenland, it is suffering the same problems as West Antarctica with deeper warm water, melting from below the ice tails of the glaciers that sit in the water. As these glaciers melt and break up they no longer buttress ice from further up the valleys, which increases their speed to the sea.

​The four above scenarios illustrate the various threats of a sea level pulse and where the main culprits are. Overall there is no stopping sea level rise but the scientific community is trying to do research on the timing.  With over 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere we are committed to a 20-metre sea level rise.
 it’s all about the timing.

​The graph below by Tim Naith shows CO2 levels on the left-hand side with sea levels at the top and temperatures at the bottom.
The yellow dot represents today. The black dot is the peak of the last warm period with CO2 levels at 300 ppm and sea levels 7 metres higher than today.
The first large red cross is 3 million years ago when CO2 levels were at 400 ppm and sea levels were 20 metres higher and it was 3 C warmer.
The second red cross is where we are headed with CO2 at 500 ppm, sea levels 40 metres higher and the temperature 5 C higher.
This information came from core samples taken from the seabed in Antarctica in the Andrill research project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZHRwDHh4B0

There is always speculation on the behavior of the Polar vortex as the Arctic sea ice disappears and the way that it will affect the weather around the world.
One theory is that as the ice disappears and the Arctic ocean warms the next coldest spot would be the high plateau of Greenland and the polar vortex might centre on that with the subsequent chaos to weather patterns in the Northern hemisphere.
In the recent invasion of warm air into the Arctic when the temperature was 30C above normal a minor Polar vortex formed over Greenland which gives some credence to the theory.

Having just done a post on the unstable weather conditions due to the warm water in the Tasman Sea I had a quick look at Met Vuw.
​There is a tropical storm coming down from the Pacific, which is a bit early in the season but not unusual.

 What is interesting is that the storm is forecast to go down the West coast and over the warm water in the Tasman Sea where it picks up heat and energy, it intensives and the pressure drops tp 992.
​To make it worse the storms southwards path is blocked by a high pressure system and it gets stuck.
​Much like the hurricane that struck Texas.

This is a four day forecast and a lot can change but you can see the effects of the warm water in the forecast.

​The ocean water in the Tasman sea is up to 6 C warmer than normal and it will have an unpredictable effect on the weather. The first and obvious outcome would be that the extra heat will raise the moisture content of the atmosphere by 8% for every extra degree of temperature rise and the extra heat can drive stronger storms. 

Instead of rain we are in a drought so what’s happening?
New Zealand has a ridge of mountains down the West coast that effectively stops rain getting past them and we need easterly winds to bring us rain to our populated areas. The current drought is due to the increased prevalence of Westerly winds due to global warming in the Southern Ocean and the very warm weather is due to the warm water in the Tasman Sea warming the winds. 

We have also had sunny, clear skies due to the high-pressure systems coming from the west. High pressure systems are from dry air descending from 10,000 metres and effectively blot out low pressure systems which rise from the sea and rise to 3000 or 5000 metres shedding moisture and heat as they ascend.
Drought is the biggest killer to our environment and to our farming economy and food production. It can kill millions of trees, dry up streams and destroy grass and other farming produce.

​Powerful rainstorms wash away topsoil and flood our estuaries with silt as well as causing damage to our infrastructure and homes.
 So what can we expect?
The drought is already with us and we still have the warmest part of the summer months to come so we can expect it to intensify.
There must also be a big risk of powerful rainstorms causing flood damage but that is less predictable and are more likely to happen later in the summer or autumn.

The water in he Tasman sea is around 4C above normal which is a big worry. So much is unknown about this type of event. Will it be there long? What effect will it have on the weather?
Currently the weather is dominated by a high pressure system so we are having a spell of warm weather but an ocean with these extreme temperature must have an effect of some kind on our islands.
​Extreme drought or floods?. 

The very fast pace of change in our modern world means that one generation is not going to be the same as the last, as even the last ten years has shown. Planning for the future needs and open mind and a good sense of social awareness.
To get an idea of the changes that are very close to us now I suggest that you watch this video of Tony Seba and reflect on the many social issues that will come from it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0&t=93s&list=FLiUwiBc_bp0xCGnsJ2LL2Tg&index=4
The video portrays some massive changes, many of which are apparent today, which will bring massive disruption to our lives and if we are to avoid massive social unrest we need to be planning for the future with a completely different mindset.

Universal wage.
The election has brought to the surface retirement pensions and the thorny issue of what age to fix it at. We also have the problem of social benefits for illness and unemployment. Lurking around the edges is the idea of the universal wage, so some people are considering changes to our social structure already. For those not familiar with the concept of a Universal Wage here is some text from Wikipedia
Basic income is potentially a much simpler and more transparent welfare system than the one existing in the welfare states around the world today.[11] Instead of having numerous welfare programs, it would simply be one universal unconditional income. This strategy for introducing basic income is controversial because some basic income supporters argue that it should be added to the existing welfare system rather than a replacement for it. 
Many hard working people do not take kindly to some people getting a living and not working, but there are bigger issues at stake and mass unemployment is a distinct possibility and it could lead to political and social instability.
We currently have unemployment rates of around 5% but governments, worldwide are notoriously devious about those figures and hide it with education and retraining plans which, in a way, accepts that there are not enough jobs to employ all those who want to work and so they go for retraining to take them off the unemployment lists.
One of the big advantages of a universal wage is that it takes the pressure off people and they then start using their creative ability to start small enterprises to earn extra money or to do good social or environmental work.

Pensions
​Here are some thoughts on the where we could have a floating retirement age where, you can choose your own retirement date starting from age sixty but the longer you leave it the more you get. The average actuarial age of death is well researched and so the government know how much they will have to pay out to the retired population. If you are a New Zealand male you are going to die (on average) at 79.1 years old. Currently pension is paid from 65 and so there are about 14.1 years of payment at $691.44 a fortnight totalling $253,481.90. If you chose to retire early at 60 you would get 19.1 years of pension and so you would get $510.43 a fortnight. If you had a hard life or illness you might prefer to retire early and make the most of it.
If we can get more people to retire early it will make room for younger people to get jobs.
As mentioned at the beginning there are massive technological social and environmental changes coming and we need to have a very open mind to avoid big social problems.