Building Resilience to Hazards Long-term Insights Briefing - Draft Briefing Consultation

Overview

On behalf of the National Hazards Board, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), and the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) have developed a draft Long-term Insights Briefing on a nationally important topic: building New Zealand’s long-term resilience to hazards, such as severe weather, pandemics, volcanic activity, and earthquakes.

Public consultation on the draft briefing closed on 27 August 2025.

Next steps

Once the briefing is finalised it will be presented to the House of Representatives and published on DPMC and MfE’s communication networks.

The briefing will also be referred to a parliamentary select committee for scrutiny and feedback.

The timeliness of national resilience discussions in New Zealand

Discussions surrounding national resilience-building are particularly timely. The country faces growing challenges from various hazards, and New Zealanders have been deeply affected by a range of these events. 

Enhancing our national resilience will help us mitigate the consequences of disasters, and capture an array of economic, social, and environmental benefits. It will give our people and economy the opportunity to thrive – not just when conditions are easy, but also when they are hard.

Draft briefing consultation

The draft briefing below shares information on New Zealand’s hazard landscape and the forces that shape it, the difficulties of resilience-building, and identifies opportunities for action – including by utilising science and technology, designing more resilient infrastructure, exploring novel funding/investment strategies, and building resilient communities.

You can read our draft briefing here: Building New Zealand’s Long-term Resilience to Hazards: Draft Long-term Insights Briefing [PDF, 830KB].

Submissions are official information

Your feedback will not be identified in the published briefing, however, submissions you make become official information, and the content of submissions can be asked for under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA). Under the OIA, we must make information available unless there is good reason for withholding it.