Resilience to Nature’s Challenges

The Resilience to Natures Challenges (RNC) programme will build and enhance local, regional, and national resilience through development of impact quantification, reduction and mitigation solutions that evaluate both ‘normal’ hazards and more extreme and complex events.

Natural hazards often do not occur in isolation, but can be part of a cascade through time, or even simply overlap through coincidence. Cascading hazards can be directly triggered, made more likely, or even inhibited. These possibilities mean that many important hazard combinations cannot be considered independently.

To improve New Zealand’s resilience to natural hazards, these interactions need to be modelled, their occurrence forecast, and impacts quantified. This will facilitate and provide the basis for novel developments in risk and impact modelling that provide a deeper and broader impact analysis across space, through time, for multiple stakeholders. This will significantly improve recovery management in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

For further details, see the Resilience Challenge - Multihazard Risk Model page.

Technical Reports

2023 Publications

Whitehead, M., McDonald, N., Dowling, L., Bui, N., Grimson, D., Bebbington, M., Mead, S., & Harte, D. 2023. Simulation Methodology: Transfer of cascading hazard outputs to direct impact assessments – internal report.

2021 Publications

Whitehead, M., Bebbington, M., Mead, S., Harte, D., & Davies, T. 2021. Multi-Hazard Metadata: An overview of data availability for the investigation of triggering, amplification, and damping during hazard cascades. Multi-Hazard Metadata, MRm team – internal report.

2020 Publications

Davies, T., Mead, S., Bebbington, M., Dunant, A., Grimson, D., Harmsworth, G., Harte, D., Harvey, E., Paulik, R., McDonald, G., Smith, N., & Whitehead, M. 2020. Multi-Hazard Risk Model, Flooding Case Study: Selection of River System and Potential Hazard Cascades. Technical Report 2020/1. MEResearch, Takapuna.

Davies, T., Mead, S., Bebbington, M., Dunant, A., Whitehead, M., Harte, D., Crawford-Flett, K., & Hicks, M. 2020. Multi-Hazard Risk Model, Flooding Case Study: Initial quantification of critical triggers and cascades for occurrence of major flooding. Technical Report 2020/11. MEResearch, Takapuna.