April 2025

Ngā mihi nui to everyone who participated in our workshops and wānanga over the last five months. 

We appreciate everyone’s time and energy, and the thoughts and ideas you shared. In this update we share the work we have been doing since then, the research structure we have developed, and how you can get involved in the next stage of research development.

Recent activities

Following our engagement events in January and February,  we collated and analysed all the feedback, and identified common themes. In late February we brought together a Platform Plan design team following an EOI process. The makeup of the design team reflected a mix of disciplines and organisations, and balanced continuity from the Resilience Challenge with new perspectives and expertise:

Charlotte Brown, Resilient Organisations
Tom Robinson, the University of Canterbury
Andrew Tait, NIWA
Shari Gallop, Pattle Delamore Partners
Tamzin Linnell, WSP
Caroline Orchiston, the University of Otago
Julia Becker, Massey University
Iain White, the University of Waikato
Jon Procter, Massey University
Liam Wotherspoon, the University of Auckland
Nick Cradock-Henry, GNS Science
Stephen MacDonell, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
Acushla Dee Sciascia, Māpuna Consultants (facilitator of our Māori engagement wānanga)
Ceridwyn Roberts, freelance science communicator

The design team has been supported by the Resilience Platform directorate (Richard Smith, Erica Townend, Nicky Smith, Hautapu Baker and Caitlin Carew) and Graham Leonard (GNS Science).

Across March this team has worked with feedback from the workshops and wānanga to develop a research structure that reflects the science capability and research activity aligned to the strategic outcomes of the Platform.

We thank the design team for their considerable efforts!

The Platform’s research will be driven across three main science themes: 

• Living with Risk: This theme places people at the centre of risk reduction and resilience, aiming to drive a shift toward a whole-of-society approach that integrates various sectors and communities to strengthen New Zealand's capacity to plan, adapt, respond, and recover effectively from multiple hazard risks.  

• Better Resilience Decisions: This theme will support decisions made by the institutions, agencies and businesses charged with managing risk for themselves or for others, through robust science-based information, tools and guidance.

• Next-Generation Risk Assessment: This theme will refine understandings of natural hazard processes, develop and test new methodologies for quantifying multiple hazards and risks, and develop consistent and comparable hazard and risk information to support decision-making. This theme strongly underpins the other science themes.

Each theme will be strongly multi-disciplinary. The boundaries between the themes will be diffuse, with purposeful and managed overlap allowing for successful integration and progression of cross-cutting or flagship-style projects.

Two research areas wrap around these core themes: 

• Vision Mātauranga: Research and activities interwoven across the science themes to support the aspirations of Māori communities for improved disaster resilience, and a community of practice for Māori researchers. Note: The working model for this research area, and how it will engage with the wider programme, is still evolving. 

• Data and Enabling Technologies: A targeted programme to lift capability and bring a greater focus to the innovation potential of data and enabling technologies in service of the science goals across the core themes and Vision Mātauranga.

Sitting around our research themes are four enabling capability areas, to help lift coordination and impact cross the natural hazards resilience system: ​ 

• Knowledge Mobilisation: Synthesising, translating and communicating Platform science for impact  

• Learning from Events and Post-event Science Coordination: Capturing data and insights, synthesising and applying lessons from damaging natural hazard events 

• Resilience Catalyst Centre: An innovation hub to address emerging user needs through joint research and resilience solutions  

• Hazard and Resilience Research Alliances: Connecting across the hazard and resilience research system to enable cooperation in support of the shared mission.

Next steps

We invite you to be part of the next stage of research development! We will be running further workshops (likely in June – August 2025) to ‘deep-dive’ into the research themes, and some of the capability areas that need to get started early.

The design team has done some thinking about potential research workstreams, and we now need to test and refine these with the wider community, develop projects, and establish research teams. We will be announcing dates for these workshops in an upcoming newsletter, so make sure you're signed up to receive these.