Perpetuating Disasters: Unbundling New Zealand’s Cycle of Inertia Following Natural Hazards

Abstract

New Zealand is stuck in a loop. The country has accumulated findings from decades of post-event inquiries into storms, floods, landslides and earthquakes. Yet it continues to default to short-term fixes despite continual recommendations for system level reform. Institutional amnesia and an unwillingness to tackle ingrained systemic issues, fuels aggravators of political short-termism, permissive land-use settings, and entrenched path-dependency on hard engineering responses like stopbanks and seawalls, which alone are insufficient to reduce the risks. The result is the perpetual inertia of a reactive response system. This inhibits any transformation to a more resilience-centric model in the face of increasingly frequent, intensive, progressive and ongoing climate changes. This report is based on a survey and analysis of post disaster reports and related climate change adaptation literature and relevant new items and identified opportunities for institutional and legislative reform that could enable barriers to adaptation action to be addressed.