New research examining New Zealand’s climate history has raised concerns that future droughts could be significantly more severe than current projections suggest, warning that policymakers may be underestimating the scale of the threat posed by a warming planet. The findings indicate that some of the country’s most devastating droughts occurred more than a century ago and have largely been overlooked in modern climate risk assessments.
For an agriculture-dependent nation such as New Zealand, drought remains one of the most serious consequences of climate change. Recent assessments have already predicted that prolonged dry periods are likely to become more intense, particularly in northern and eastern regions that are naturally more vulnerable to rainfall shortages. Climate experts say the country has already experienced visible signs of worsening drought conditions, including drying rivers, shrinking reservoirs, scorched farmlands and increasing hardship for farmers struggling to maintain livestock feed supplies.
Past events have also shown the significant economic consequences of severe droughts. An extended drought in 2007-08 severely affected the Waikato region and triggered major feed shortages, leading to a dramatic rise in silage prices and causing losses worth billions to the national economy. Another major drought in 2012-13 that spread across the North Island was estimated to reduce economic output by nearly 0.7% of the country’s GDP. The severity of that event led financial institutions to use it as a benchmark for assessing agricultural lending risks.
However, researchers argue that limiting assessments to recent decades may provide an incomplete picture. Their study suggests that historical climate events from the early 20th century reveal droughts that were even more severe than those remembered in modern times. Scientists believe such events have not been adequately considered while planning for future climate risks.
To understand long-term drought patterns, researchers moved beyond modern climate datasets, which only provide extensive information from around the 1970s onward. Instead, they relied on historical rainfall deficits measured through thousands of rain gauges operating across New Zealand since the 1860s. The team selected 97 weather stations with reliable long-term records and compared rainfall data with historical averages to track drought intensity over varying timescales.
Their findings challenged assumptions that recent decades witnessed the country’s most extreme droughts. According to the study, the three most severe meteorological droughts in New Zealand’s recorded history all occurred before 1950.
One particularly intense drought began during the winter of 1914 and extended into early 1915. Researchers found that much of the country experienced record-low rainfall over several months. More than half of the weather stations involved in the study registered some of their driest conditions ever during that period. Scientists described the event as an extraordinary multi-year drought sequence with impacts that would likely be far more devastating if repeated today.
The research also identified the summer drought of 1907-08 as one of the most extreme in historical records. Many regions in the South Island experienced their driest conditions during that period. Another drought in 1945-46 caused severe rainfall shortages across parts of the North Island, with deficits considerably larger than those recorded during the widely remembered 2012-13 drought.
Researchers said the findings highlight a major gap between modern experience and historical climate extremes. With global temperatures rising, prolonged dry spells could become even more severe due to increased evaporation and worsening soil moisture loss. Experts warned that relying only on recent events as indicators for future planning may no longer be sufficient. A warming climate, they said, could expose New Zealand to drought conditions beyond anything experienced in living memory.
