New Zealand Needs a Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risk – And We’ve Drafted the Bill

An election-year proposal, put in the open for debate

By Islands for the Future of Humanity

TLDR/Summary

• The global risk picture is serious and, for several risks, worsening: geopolitical turmoil, the risk of nuclear conflict, bioengineered pandemics, large volcanic eruptions, severe space weather, AI-enabled systemic failures, and the trade and supply-chain collapse that an isolated trading nation would feel most.
• New Zealand is ill-prepared. Useful work on planning and resilience exists, but it is fragmented, ad hoc, domestic, short-horizon, and largely silent on global catastrophic risk.
• We propose a Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risk (PCCR), an independent Officer of Parliament modelled on the proven Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and we’ve drafted a Bill to show it can be done.
• The public mood is shifting from efficiency and profit toward resilience and security. The data back this: a majority of New Zealanders, across the political spectrum, support institutional action on catastrophic risk.
• 2026 is an election year. Which party will pick this up and campaign on it?

The global situation is serious, and New Zealand is not ready

The world is not short of warnings. Across our recent work, including our two Policy Quarterly papers (2021, 2025) and our synthesis of the latest European risk-science conference, we have made the same case. Risk governance still systematically under-weights the low-probability, high-impact, cross-border catastrophes that a small, remote, trade-dependent nation is most exposed to. Great Power war, nuclear war and nuclear winter, extreme pandemics, large volcanic eruptions, solar storms, AI catastrophes: are each individually unlikely in any given year, but collectively close to certain over the decades, and capable of severing the flow of fuel, fertiliser, medicines and food on which NZ depends.

Our country has pieces of an answer, a National Risk Register, DPMC’s resilience work, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), sectoral strategies. But these all remain fragmented, focused on familiar domestic hazards, after-the-fact response plans to international crises, and are quiet on the risk of global catastrophe. Some activity is real. The coordination, the scope, and the public conversation are missing.

Why central, independent oversight, and why now

This is not just an organisational gap. As one of us argued at the SRA-E conference, fragile systems are selected for. Where no agency faces real pressure to look across silos and over the horizon, none does, and individually rational behaviour (each department defending its own patch, each firm externalising its risk) compounds collective danger. Siloed risk assessment can even improve one entity’s resilience while degrading the whole. Correcting that requires a body whose explicit job is to suppress this drift: to aggregate across hazards, take the long view, a view of global reality, realistic futures, tail risk, and answer to Parliament rather than the three-year cycle.

That is the logic behind risk mitigation best-practice harnessing “three lines of defence”: operational agencies on the front line, DPMC providing managerial oversight, and an independent scrutineer, the PCCR, as the third line. The Commissioner would not run emergencies. Instead, the Commissioner would:

• Assess global, systemic, and catastrophic risk
• Critique national risk assessments and risk registers (including what they leave out and how little they say about mitigation options)
• Advocate for basic-needs continuity and regional cooperation with Australia and the Pacific, and, crucially,
• Open these questions to the public through deliberative democracy, such as Citizens’ Assemblies.

The aversion to “scaring the public” has to go; the evidence is that people are ahead of the institutions, and are seeking security, resilience, and sustainable wellbeing amid global turmoil.

We’ve drafted the Bill – in the open

To move from argument to action, we’ve prepared draft legislation for NZ: the Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risk Bill. It borrows the durable architecture of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Officer of Parliament status, a long appointment term insulated from electoral pressure, independence from ministerial direction, and adds a statutory definition of basic needs, oversight of national risk processes, and a mandate for transparent reporting. The draft has been peer-reviewed by a legal colleague, though no doubt it could be improved further in a robust Select Committee process with public input.

We envision a small office (perhaps 8–10 people, no operational role) against the scale of harm it would help avoid: the cost-benefit ratio could be overwhelming, and the resilience co-benefits, local food, energy security, better infrastructure, would help New Zealanders now.

We are publishing this openly, for discussion, inspiration, and debate. That is deliberate. We are not slipping it to a staffer’s personal email, or hand-delivering hard copies to leave no digital trail, as recently alleged in the lobbying over NZ’s climate legislation. Good risk governance is the opposite of regulatory capture: transparent, contestable, and built in public.

An election-year question

“Balancing the books” is not a national strategy for a century this turbulent, where it is unclear how business-as-usual energy and financial architectures will keep performing. We need a vision of serious, long-term resilience, de-risking while we still can in the face of catastrophes we can foresee and the ones we can’t. The UK is drafting law, the EU is building the system, the Nordics already live preparedness. 2026 is a NZ election year. Global instability is real and rising, and this should be front and centre.

So here is the question for every NZ political party: who will take this Bill, or one like it, and campaign on it?

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