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Climate change will cause significant loss and damage throughout New Zealand. This will affect everyone. When considering the options for responding, compensation will inevitably be raised, as either a requirement or a policy choice. Many people, however, appear reticent to engage with ‘compensation’ either as a word or as a concept; preferring to avoid it altogether. This article argues that compensation will be an unavoidable part of the discussion about how best to respond to the challenges of climate change. It is an integral aspect of the law of compulsory acquisition and the Public Works Act. It sits in the background to both legal and popular understandings of other statutory regimes such as the Biosecurity and Earthquake Commission Acts. This article explores the ramifications of this observation from a legal perspective and suggests that careful thought should be given, as soon as possible, to the development of a principled approach to compensation for climate change loss and damage.

Climate change will place increasing numbers of homeowners in ‘property purgatory’, a state of financial insecurity arising from the foreseeability of eventual damage and uncertainty about means to recover their losses. The impacts of climate change-induced sea level rise and storm events are now certain, and exposed properties will likely incur insurance, mortgage and value loss. These effects could occur prior to physical damage, and existing inequities will be magnified. Current legal and institutional arrangements offer no clear pathway for those affected to recover funds in order to relocate themselves. We position property purgatory as an immediate practical challenge for those affected seeking to recover their losses, and as a legal question regarding undefined responsibilities of central and local government.

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This article considers what Australian responses to climate change may teach us about the concept of ownership. Through a close analysis of laws aimed at encouraging specific land uses in order to mitigate emissions, it argues that these laws support the increasingly uncontroversial claim that ownership of estates or interests in land places obligations and responsibilities on owners to exercise the resulting rights for the benefit of others. However, although land ownership is flexible enough to support the environmental objectives of these laws, their failure to adequately accommodate the practicalities of ownership, such as anticipating the position of successors in title, increases the risk of conflict between owners of estates and interests in land, and compromises the ability of both environmental and property law regimes to achieve their intended objectives.