Building New Zealand's long-term resilience to hazards, such as severe weather, tsunami, pandemics, volcanic activity, and earthquakes, has been an increasing focus for policy makers as evidenced by recent reports by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), Ministry for the Environment (MfE), the New Zealand Treasury, and the National Infrastructure Commission. As the joint briefing by DPMC and MfE states, “Resilience is not a nice-to-have; it is a prudent way to ensure our prosperity and security”.
Severe weather and flooding are identified as one of the six major hazards that are either catastrophic in their potential or occur so frequently that they produce significant cumulative impacts on human welfare, especially if they occur with little or no warning. These events already cost billions and are expected to become even more economically as well as socially, psychologically, and environmentally disruptive as the climate continues to change.
Investing in risk reduction is, in the long run, far more cost effective than payment for damage-repair or replacement after a disaster has occurred. While a response capability to an emergency event remains essential, reducing risk and improving New Zealand’s readiness to these events enables hazards to be anticipated earlier and impact to be mitigated before they escalate, lowering the human and economic costs of disasters. Recent New Zealand research shows that, across the four domains of emergency management – risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery (the 4Rs) – natural hazard spending over the last 15 years has been disproportionately concentrated on the reactive domains of response and recovery, rather than on proactive investment in risk reduction and readiness.
This report presents a value-for-money analysis to support the case for investment in enhancing New Zealand’s Early Warning Capability (EWC) to detect and issue alerts for risks emanating from threats of natural hazards. EWC refers to the specific desired effect under specific conditions through a combination of systems, processes, people and technologies required to detect emerging natural hazards, interpret risk, and communicate timely warnings that enable proactive action before an impact occurs or escalates.
The analysis in this report focuses primarily on the role of technology within Early Warning Systems (EWS), a component of an EWC. The benefits that an investment in such a technology can deliver represents a proactive measure to improve outcomes from flooding caused by severe weather events. While this focus allows for a more robust and tractable analysis, it represents only one component of a broader set of capabilities that are required to reduce the impact from a disaster.