De-risking Resilience

Currently, decision-makers have to mediate considerable institutional, professional, and political risks that arise from mitigating natural hazards, such as how sure are we? How much will it cost? Who pays? What should we prioritise?

Some of these risks can be addressed by better science, or more accurate data, but where situations are complex, uncertain, and value-laden, action is difficult and natural hazard risks may be transferred to the state and private sector, or to people, places, and future generations.

We are working to build understanding of the real-world ‘risks’ of decision making and so increase the potential of resilience science, tools, and policies from multiple areas across the challenge to have real-world impact. Our research is being conducted in two workstreams:

• In the Innovating Resilience workstream we aim to deepen the understanding of the science-policy-practice interface in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are working on case studies with central and local government stakeholders, focusing on issues such as sea-level rise and managed retreat, and testing a range of innovations and approaches to reduce the gap between resilience science and societal action.
• In the Incentivising Resilience workstream, we are exploring new ways to motivate and incentivise resilient behaviours in the context of uncertainty and multiple hazards. We are researching the economics of climate change adaptation, the economic impacts of natural hazards, and the financial instruments (such as insurance) that can be used to incentivise resilience.

Our goal is to help enable more difficult decisions to be taken, particularly those that bring considerable institutional, professional, economic and political risks for those making them.