Rural people need to plan for and learn about disaster survival and the array of disaster types they may have to deal with, writes Federated Farmers Hawke's Bay provincial president Jim Galloway.

What the future holds for us is largely unknown but if history has taught us anything it is that it is safe to plan for disaster.

The Hawke's Bay is no stranger to adverse events. Our history is marked by earthquakes, floods and fires so we need to think about disaster planning.

Recently I attended a workshop on the Hikurangi Subduction zone to learn about how our region would be impacted by a major earthquake (magnitude 8.9, the last one of which was about 500 years ago).

The major takeaway was the isolation we as a region, particularly rural people, are more than likely going to find ourselves flung into.

If a major shake happened here we would be flattened and alone.

Survivors in the Bay area would have to be able to look after themselves for a lot longer than probably anyone would expect after the predicted shakes, fires and five meter tsunami.

We probably wouldn't be able to easily communicate as fibre cables that feed into cellphone towers would be shot and massive slips would block most roads.

The Government would focus its initial responses where the biggest human populations are, and that's Auckland and Wellington followed by other urban centres.

What we know now is that if disaster strikes we are on our own for at least three days with little or no communications or electricity, but that's still a best case scenario.

What the recent Nelson fire has shown us is that no one has planned for a 10 day-plus active fire event. But this is now a reality for some.

We need people to start planning for and learning about disaster survival and the array of disaster types they may have to deal with.

Also practise and ensure everyone in your family knows the plans.

The community will need better resourcing in terms of funding community resilience, coordinated efforts between central and local government and community groups.

That planning should be under way now, with all regions having common systems so anyone from anywhere can immediately step in and not have to spend valuable time getting up to speed.

“Global heating” is a more accurate term than “global warming” to describe the changes taking place to the world’s climate, according to a key scientist at the UK Met Office.

Prof Richard Betts, who leads the climate research arm of Britain’s meteorological monitoring organisation, made the comments amid growing evidence that rising temperatures have passed the comfort zone and are now bringing increased threats to humanity.

“Global heating is technically more correct because we are talking about changes in the energy balance of the planet,” the scientist said at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland. “We should be talking about risk rather than uncertainty.”

Earlier this month, the Met Office produced a new report that showed the searing heatwave that hit the UK this summer – along with other parts of the northern hemisphere – was made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Betts said the shifting climate was pushing some natural processes – such as the blossoming of trees and laying of eggs – out of sync. “That’s already happening. We are also seeing higher temperatures of heatwaves. The kind of thing we saw this year will happen more often.

“The risks are compounding all the time. It stands to reason that the sooner we can take action, the quicker we can rein them in.”