Flagship Leader: Erica Seville, Resilient Organisations

This flagship focuses on determining how we decide where to invest attention and finances to improve NZ’s resilience to earthquakes.

Key research thrusts in this Flagship include:

• Review existing tools: Review of existing tools and evaluation techniques to better understand their suitability and relevance for supporting different types of decisions about how best to improve NZ’s resilience to earthquakes.
• Evaluation of cases studies: Evaluation of real-world resilience investment decision case studies for New Zealand.  Example topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
  • What are the most effective forms of investment to support a community’s resilience and/or recovery?  How do we make the business case for resilience investment?   How might we differentiate between public and private benefits and costs?  Are there different ways to encourage and finance resilience investments?
  • What are the implications of different recovery decisions?   For example, what pace and sequencing of rebuild is desired to deliver an effective recovery?  What are the implications of changes to codes or construction practices?  When are the use of cordons and/or demolition orders appropriate?    How might we decide following future earthquake whether an area should or should not be rezoned?
  • What are the barriers and enablers for effective resilience and recovery governance?  How might we achieve better community engagement in resilience and recovery decisions?  Are there particular governance structures that work better for different contexts or scales of event?
  • Address knowledge gaps: Research to address current knowledge gaps, including: improving our ability to evaluate socio-economic impacts from earthquakes; improving our understanding and analysis of system effects; exploring new ways to evaluate the case for investment; or finding new ways to communicate with and engage the public and key stakeholders to invest in resilience. 

What will success look like

• Key stakeholders (which stakeholders will depend on the Resilience Pathway decision being evaluated) actively using the evaluations that emerge from the Resilience Pathways Decision teams to support their investment decision making.
• Tools and techniques for evaluating resilience investments become ‘mainstream’ in the sense that practitioners have the confidence to either use them directly, or to commission their use for evaluating resilience investments as a matter of good practice.
• Practicality and relevance of research outcomes demonstrated by policy makers actively seeking out researchers to provide advice and input into future resilience investment decisions.

Research Meeting Schedule (link)

Flagship 5 Research Projects (2017)

2016 Projects