On a very small scale, one thing I have noticed in my everyday existence is the introduction of pests. We maintain a small domestic orchard, have done for 11 years. When we started, we just pruned, the trees fruited and we had plenty. Then we got codling moth, which we fought until we decided to remove the apple and pear trees because it was beating us and the effort wasn't worth it.
Then we got guava moth, which has attacked the plums and citrus and feigoas. That parasite was not here, nor was myrtle rust.
At the same time we have seen climatic conditions change, not the winterless north anymore. Huge variance in sea temperatures from year to year ( I'm a fisherman so I note water temps ). Very hard to predict what is happening based on previous years.
For commercial growers, they must use ever increasing pesticides and herbicides to keep above the new problems and we will ingest some of those.
Pests and pandemics are a big problem with climate change.
You wonder what would have happened had New Zealand experienced the big flood during the height of the Covid outbreak, piling those two issues on top of one another would be catastrophic.
When these weather events are more frequent and the next pandemic hits....I wonder how people like Wiz think services will cope with two big problems at once, well I guess they would just have to get on and get stuck in, but the real problem is how to do this long term when the balance is out of kilter and perennial crop failure is thrown into the mix.
Our one advantage is our isolation, it is harder for boat people to get here, yet on the flip side, because we are small and far away, should a desperate nation decide to invade this country - in the context of global melt down - there is no way our allies would be able to come to the rescue, given they will need to use their might to defend their own coastlines and deal with their own internal strife.
That is dramatic. So lets just talk practicalities and extremely likely scenarios.
Extremely likely we have a lot of flooding in New Zealand for the next decades, and extremely likely we see our agricultural industry heavily impacted by climate change.
And it is fact that climate change walks along side things like pandemics. When you upset natural systems you get disease outbreak, we know this for certain.
As for temperature fluctuations in the Ocean, that is a big problem if the food chain gets upset and our usual marine creatures change their behavior radically or just piss off elsewhere and or die.