Abstract | Building resilience on Temaiku Bight, Tarawa, Kiribati

MFAT and the Government of Kiribati (GoK) are undertaking a land and urban development project in the Temaiku Bight on Tarawa, Kiribati. The goals of the Project are to provide an assessment of the feasibility of increasing the height of approximately 330 hectares of the Temaiku Bight to approximately 2 metres above highest measured sea level and develop an accompanying conceptual land use plan that address resilience issues impacting the atoll including rapid urbanisation, limited water supply, ecosystem services and an increasing risk of land inundation from king tides exasperated under the influence of climate change.

Jacobs have been retained to undertake this multi-disciplinary feasibility study which comprises over sixty geotechnical engineers, coast process engineers, urban planners, social impact and stakeholder engagement specialists, and a full sweep of environmental subject matter experts both terrestrial and marine. This presentation will focus on the approach taken to provide an integrated solution to resilience including the phasing of project, use of multiple stakeholder workshops, collaborative online spatial tools and participatory community engagement.

Building resilience speaks not only to the dredging and hard engineering elements of the project it is a metaphor for what the community and government of Kiribati want to reclaim culturally and environmentally from an area of the atoll that has been highly modified and ecological degraded. In this context resilience is seen as a process and the people of Kiribati are actively involved in building this for themselves while a plethora of professional specialists act as enablers and facilitators.

Bio | Simon Liddell

Simon Liddell BSc Geology, Otago University, MSc Physical Geography VUW. Simon is an environmental consultant with over 20 years of international experience in strategic environmental assessment, environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA), environmental due diligence, environmental management, contaminant hydrogeology, human health quantitative risk assessment, water supply investigations and geotechnical assessment. Simon specialises in understanding clients’ needs with a particular focus on large scale projects in challenging environmental and social regions globally.

Simon has provided environmental advice to the Government of the Republic of South Africa in relation to gas utilisation master planning and the environmental technical and economic risks of development of shale gas. Simon has trailed the use of remote sensing derived oil spill sensitivity maps for the coastline of Azerbaijan and continues to develop innovative applications of digital spatial tools in engineering, environmental and social disciplines. He has also managed numerous full multi-disciplinary ESIAs teams and due diligences thereof on petrochemical plants, combined cycle gas turbine power plants and oil and gas exploration in South East Asia, Australian, Africa, the Middle East and several countries of the former Soviet Union. Follow his recent return to New Zealand he was a guest speaker at the Common Ground Festival Water Series in Lower Hutt bring together artists, citizens, scientists and planners about water issues.