NZ SeaRise

NZ SeaRise, also known by its alias, is headquartered in New Zealand.
The organisation runs a website that delivers updated coastal flood risk data.
This data incorporates vertical land movement to produce location‑specific sea‑level rise projections.
The projections are used for infrastructure planning and to inform emissions policy discussions.

On 2 May 2022 the NZ SeaRise website experienced a cyber attack shortly after its launch.
The attack generated roughly ten thousand hits per second from suspected overseas IP addresses.
The volume of traffic overwhelmed the server and rendered the platform inaccessible.
Project co‑leaders suggested the disruption might stem from anti‑climate change actors or automated bots, though no definitive attribution was confirmed.

The outage prevented local government officials from accessing the sea‑level rise projections needed for climate adaptation planning.
Residents seeking to understand flood risks for their properties were also frustrated by the service interruption.
The website normally provides the only publicly available source of flood data that accounts for land‑elevation changes in the region.
At the time of the attack public and governmental interest in the projections was heightened because they indicated accelerated timelines for coastal flooding thresholds in populated areas due to land subsidence.

By knocking the site offline the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in disseminating climate science amid contested public discourse.
The attack underscored the reliance on online platforms for delivering essential environmental information to decision‑makers and the public.
Although the service was disrupted, the underlying data and projections remained unchanged and were restored once the website was brought back online.
No further details about the organisation’s size, ownership, or parent‑subsidiary structure are available in the supplied sources.