Flagship Leader: Erica Seville, Resilient Organisations
Opportunity
While most regions have economic models suitable for forecasting economic development under “business-as-usual‟ conditions, none have the capability to model the impact of transformational “shocks‟ to the economy caused by major events and infrastructure failures. Infrastructure interdependencies create complexity in the assessment of economic impacts resulting from component and cascading failures. To achieve earthquake resilience we must face these complexities head on, leverage data from impacts during the Canterbury Earthquakes to validate complex systems models, extend such models to include inter-relationship between horizontal (e.g. pipelines) and vertical infrastructure (e.g. buildings), and seek to quantify the resulting economic impacts.
The research under this Flagship will develop tools for evaluating and comparing the resilience of different infrastructure, enable stakeholders to quantitatively value seismic resilience investments, and assess the economic implications of mitigation, risk management, and post-earthquake recovery decisions considering infrastructure interdependencies. In this Flagship project we will seek to extend the capability of existing tools to account for direct and indirect losses from earthquakes to enable the critical evaluation of investment decisions and priorities for improving our nation’s resilience to earthquakes. For example, in collaboration with Flagship 3, we will examine the implications of alternative Earthquake-Prone Building policy settings on different regional economies in NZ. We will directly examine high-level priorities for seismic resilience investments taking due account for the complex interdependencies, including investment in more robust horizontal infrastructure, low-damage building stock, or improved post-earthquake response and recovery actions. Finally, we will directly examine alternative recovery interventions, their efficacy in different scenarios, and assess the needs of policy makers and emergency managers in the aftermath of our next major earthquake disaster.
Industry partners and stakeholders
This Flagship will leverage the $40 Billion investment in the rebuild of Christchurch, an unparalleled opportunity for cutting-edge research with immediate and far-reaching applications. Key consulting engineers actively engaged in Christchurch Rebuild projects will continue on-going collaborations with QuakeCoRE researchers to facilitate efficient technology transfer. As the responsible government entity for building standards, the MBIE Building Performance Group will be a key stakeholder and will be directly involved in the research through their (>$2M) on-going support of a work stream on the performance of concrete buildings. Other key stakeholders already supporting work of QuakeCoRE researchers on related topics include BRANZ and EQC.
Impact
Our goal is to identify how infrastructure investment decisions affect the economic and social resilience of the communities they serve, at local, regional and national scales. QuakeCoRE will bring together expertise in all forms of infrastructure (horizontal and vertical), spatially distributed ground motions, interdependencies, economic modelling, and planning, to develop a holistic understanding of economic impacts from earthquakes; thus, providing key input to policy decisions at all levels of government.
Scoping tourism dynamics post-quake: A module for MERIT
Understanding the governance dimensions of earthquake resilience
Creating the business case for investment in organisational resilience
Effects of alternative reconstruction pathways on earthquake recovery
Linking building properties and damage to earthquake-induced business’ downtime
Are plans at fault? Understanding how active faults are incorporated into land use plans
Data integration and visualisation: Prototyping QuakeCoRE data platform for diverse needs