Rural Disaster Risk Decision-making

People making decisions about risk management need to understand the hazards, and the exposure and vulnerability of communities and assets to those hazards. By quantifying the risks and anticipating the potential impacts of hazards, governments, industries, communities, and individuals can make informed decisions on resilience. Such information can be used to set priorities for mitigation and adaptation strategies, sector plans, programmes, projects, and budgets.

This project is being carried out in two workstreams:

• Taranaki Mounga eruption scenario
  For this significant project, we have partnered with Taranaki Civil Defence and Emergency Management and the Volcano, Multihazard Risk, and Whanake te Kura I Tawhiti Nui programmes of the Resilience Challenge in a multi-year co-creation activity focused on building resilience to future eruptions from Taranaki Mounga. The goal is to develop world-leading risk and resilience science around three aspects of resilience: pre-event mitigation, crisis decision-making, and pre-event recovery planning.
• Disaster risk and resilience of tourists and transient populations
  The goal of this workstream is to improve our understanding of the exposure of tourists and transient populations (temporary and seasonal workers) to disaster risk, and to strengthen emergency management arrangements as they relate specifically to tourists and transient populations. We are using new technologies to develop real-time understanding of visitor movement patterns, behaviours, and decision-making. We are also working with emergency managers to improve post-disaster response and recovery.

Our goal is to support rural decision-makers with practical and applicable new knowledge, to improve event planning, preparedness and response for rural Aotearoa New Zealand.