Have your say on the DPMC’s Insights Briefing by 27 August
Background
New Zealand public sector agencies must prepare a ‘long-term insights briefing’ every three years. This is an opportunity to look beyond short-term political cycles and use foresight to see what really matters to New Zealand over the longer course.
In 2025 DPMC has collaborated with the National Hazards Board, and the Ministry for the Environment to produce a draft Briefing on “Building Resilience to Hazards“.
In the present global ecological and geopolitical context it seems nothing could be more important and the document is currently out for public consultation.
We have submitted feedback on this Briefing. The opening paragraphs of our submission read as follows:
Introduction
Islands for the Future of Humanity commend the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), National Hazards Board, and Ministry for the Environment for producing the Draft Long-Term Insights Briefing (LTIB) on Building New Zealand’s Long-Term Resilience to Hazards (2025). It is clear that considerable effort has gone into framing resilience as a long-term national priority, one that reaches beyond the short-term horizons of electoral cycles. The LTIB recognises that resilience is essential not only for hazard response but also for long-term wellbeing and prosperity. This acknowledgment is timely and welcome.
This submission offers constructive feedback aimed at strengthening the LTIB. Specifically, we argue for expanding the scope of hazards considered, embedding a systemic and evolutionary risk framework, ensuring that the focus of government is on safeguarding basic needs in all circumstances, and advancing institutional reforms that guarantee transparency, accountability, and informed consent. We also highlight the importance of reframing resilience as an opportunity for national growth, rather than primarily a narrative of risk and trade-offs.
By adopting these improvements, the LTIB has the potential to position New Zealand as a global leader in anticipatory governance of global risks and hazards.
You can read our full submission here (PDF, 12 pages).
Do you agree with us? Public consultation is open until 27 August, you can have your say by completing the simple online form found here.
Consider donating
If you support our project of providing non-partisan evidence-based information and options to support resilience to global catastrophic risks, then consider donating to help our charity Islands for the Future of Humanity.
Your support allows us to continue producing risk information and resilience options that could benefit New Zealand and the world.
Do these NZ government draft plans adequately address national resilience?
TLDR/Summary
The NZ Government is consulting on two major draft plans: the National Infrastructure Plan and the National Fuel Security Plan.
Our charity, Islands for the Future of Humanity, submitted responses to both, urging stronger planning for global catastrophic risks (GCRs) like nuclear war, extreme pandemics, or trade collapse.
We find both plans lack adequate preparation for long-term or extreme global disruptions or global critical infrastructure destruction.
Our recommendations include more focus on infrastructure essential for providing basic needs like water, food, transport and communications in the worst possible scenarios, such as trade isolation.
We also propose mandatory resilience assessments in all infrastructure investment decisions, explicitly addressing potential global catastrophes.
Submissions are open: help shape NZ’s future resilience before the deadlines—6 August (Infrastructure) and 25 August (Fuel Security).
Two critical government consultations
The New Zealand government has called for submissions on drafts of two major plans pertaining to national infrastructure and fuel security.
The NZ Infrastructure Commission and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have asked how we can future-proof the systems that keep our country running.
Our non-partisan independent charity Islands for the Future of Humanity has made submissions on both, advocating for a bold shift in how we think about resilience: not just to climate change or short-term shocks, but to global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that could fundamentally alter New Zealand’s operating environment.
We find that neither draft satisfactorily addresses global catastrophic risk. We need to ask more of our decisionmakers to ensure national resilience and future wellbeing.
Government plans need to ensure basic needs like food, water, transport and communications can be provided no matter what catastrophes befall the world.
The Draft National Fuel Security Plan, released by MBIE, proposes stockholding obligations, better data visibility, expanded fuel storage, and support for biofuels and EVs. The Plan builds on the 2025 Fuel Security Study, which modelled a severe 90-day disruption to fuel imports (and which we critiqued in a previous post finding the analysis wanting). While welcome progress, the draft plan stops short of addressing how New Zealand could survive a prolonged or permanent disruption to global fuel supply—such as from nuclear conflict, electromagnetic pulse, or widespread supply chain collapse. These are not science fiction; they’re now being actively studied by global agencies, including the US National Academies of Sciences and a new UN Scientific Panel on nuclear war impacts (see our previous post on these reports).
In our submission, we call for a fuel system that guarantees basic needs—food, water, critical transport—under even the worst scenarios. That means modelling fuel demand for essential services in year-long (or longer) disruptions, and developing domestic liquid fuel production capacity, especially regionally distributed biofuel refineries that can pivot between commercial and crisis modes. Electrification is essential, but we must also prepare for shocks that knock out the electric grid itself, as detailed in our recent webinar and expert panel discussion on catastrophic electricity loss.
Meanwhile, the Draft National Infrastructure Plan, published by the NZ Infrastructure Commission, takes a broad look at long-term investment challenges. It rightly addresses fiscal constraints, climate resilience, and aging infrastructure—but barely mentions the possibility of catastrophic global disruption, yet the risk of this is clearly rising, as we’ve discussed in a previous post. Our submission urges the Commission to embed systemic risk and GCR thinking into infrastructure planning, including:
Distributed and resilient energy and food systems,
Domestic cloud and communication infrastructure,
Transport redundancy across islands and to Australia, and
Pandemic-ready health facilities and critical supply sovereignty.
We also argue for mandatory resilience assessments in infrastructure funding decisions, contemplating catastrophic risk scenarios, and using long timeframes and appropriate discount rates that don’t marginalise future generations.
Both submissions draw on our wider work, including our NZCat Report, which maps how island nations like New Zealand are vulnerable to GCRs, but with foresight can play a vital global role in preserving human civilisation through catastrophe—if we plan accordingly.
Let’s make sure resilience means more than recovery after the fact, or merely protecting business as usual. It must mean anticipatory governance and preparedness for whatever comes.
Support our work
If you support this kind of thinking and work, then help us free up time to do more. Please consider donating via our NZ registered charity’s givealittle page.
I attended the 2025 European Urban Resilience Forum in Rotterdam and learned the following:
There is a resilience blind spot: European cities excel at climate adaptation but miss the bigger picture—climate change is just one of 14 global systemic stresses that could cascade into catastrophic failures.
Cities like Rotterdam have made advances: Treating cities like accident patients, monitoring vital systems (electricity, water, transport, communications) through cross-sector teams that meet fortnightly, building relationships and understanding system interdependencies.
War is a resilience killer: Geopolitical conflicts from Ukraine to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning, diverting resources from preparation to immediate survival.
New Zealand’s unique challenge: Our geographic isolation could be either shield or vulnerability—New Zealand needs resilience systems that preserve urban functions when global supply chains collapse, not just protection from local weather events.
We must move beyond simple climate thinking: Nuclear conflict, extreme pandemics, and system-wide failures don’t respect borders—urban resilience must address the full spectrum of global catastrophic risk.
The bottom line: New Zealand must ensure cities can maintain basic human needs (water, food, energy, communications) post-catastrophe, turning our remoteness into strength rather than weakness.
A Judging Panel at the Forum concurred that pilot projects are over—we need systematic approaches that seek to change the mechanics of cities.
Action needs to include cooperation among organisations. At home this might mean NEMA working seriously with the Infrastructure Commission, overseen by Chief Risk or Resilience Officers to build resilient solutions ahead of time.
Graphical recordings of the European Resilience Forum 2025 sessions can be accessed here.
Introduction
I attended the European Urban Resilience Forum (Rotterdam, June 25-27), which brought together city leaders, policy makers, and resilience practitioners grappling with an uncomfortable reality: traditional approaches to climate adaptation may no longer be sufficient in an era of converging and interacting global risks.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor discussed life six metres below sea level, while Greek innovation seeks to detect wildfires using AI-enabled drones, and Ukrainian municipal officials are balancing climate action against the immediate demands and effects of war. Discussions at the Forum revealed both the promise and limitations of current resilience thinking.
While many European cities are pioneering innovative climate adaptation approaches, there was also a critical blind spot that New Zealand, given its unique geography and vulnerabilities, cannot afford to ignore: the need to build resilience not just to local climate impacts, but to the full spectrum of global catastrophic and systemic risk and the various cascading and interacting effects that could reshape our world.
The State of Play: Europe’s Resilience Foundations
The Forum’s opening session, featuring a video message from Kamal Kishore of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, established the context that while disaster-related deaths have declined decade on decade, exposure to droughts and seismic risks continues to rise across Europe’s increasingly urbanised landscape. The message was clear, cities house 70% of Europe’s population and face disproportionate climate impacts, but this concentration also presents an opportunity for disproportionate positive impact through targeted urban resilience investments.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor delivered practical wisdom: we need to make cities green. At six meters below sea level, Rotterdam has learned that green infrastructure—water buffers, reduced concrete, car-free spaces—isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about heat stress relief, flood management, and public health.
The city’s Roofscape Rotterdam tool allows users to map how 18 square kilometres of roof space could contribute to energy, water management, and other resilience goals, exemplifying the kind of bold and systematic thinking needed.
Our own food system research has recently argued for discussions about land use policy in the context of urban and near urban agriculture for resilience. Similar interactive tools could encourage the public to explore and debate optimal land use policy in New Zealand to balance resilience and development.
A recurring theme at the Forum was multilevel governance with risk ownership at every scale, supported by central government. European officials consistently emphasised the need to move beyond viewing resilience as a cost, instead acknowledging it as essential infrastructure investment that protects people, economies, and existing assets, with figures suggesting every dollar spent on resilience prevents ten dollars in future harm.
Although collaboration was spoken of across many contexts, the most innovative and actioned insights came from Rotterdam’s Maarten Nypels who oversees the Vital Urban Systems programme. Maarten articulated both the theoretical and practical dimensions of addressing our current predicament. He observed that “most crises are manmade”, a point that aligns with metacrisis thinking I’ve outlined in my recent blogs. He noted that humanity needs to understand how we created global and systemic vulnerabilities before we can address them effectively. This was a perspective missing from many reactive resilience solutions.
One of Maarten’s practical solutions is transformative: treat a city like an accident patient whose vital signs need constant monitoring. Rotterdam’s Vital Systems resilience program brings together experts responsible for electricity, water, transport, communications, and data systems in iterative fashion. Meeting fortnightly for three hours, these professionals developed deep understanding of system interdependencies and potential cascading failures, understanding each other’s systems. More importantly, they built the relationships and communication channels that enable rapid coordinated response when crises hit.
This model addresses a fundamental challenge in resilience building: breaking down silos and addressing resilience with cross-cutting approaches, agnostic to the specific hazards, whether climate change or otherwise.
Lessons about the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts presented by Cedric Grant reinforced this. As a Director of recovery, he provided key learnings such as New Orleans developing five microgrid electrical systems to prevent future total power loss, and collaborating with global experts from the Netherlands on flood protection, but also the learning that childcare availability determines whether people can report to work during recovery. The social infrastructure proved as critical as the physical.
The Blind Spot: Systemic risk and polycrisis
The Forum included a session on the current global polycrisis, in which panellists acknowledged the need for holistic approaches, but the discussion fell short of addressing the full spectrum of systemic and global catastrophic risk.
Climate change dominated discussions, despite being just one of 14 global systemic stresses. The holistic agenda needs to encompass disaster risk reduction, systemic risk (system-wide failures), polycrisis (interacting and cascading risks), the underlying stresses generating these risks, and the underlying drivers of humanity’s current predicament. These drivers include human behaviour, and evolutionary and game-theoretic processes subsumed under the moniker of ‘metacrisis’, just as Maarten alluded.
Visual summary of the session on polycrisis and urban resilience. Image credit: carlottacat.com
The narrow focus on climate mitigation and adaptation becomes particularly problematic when considering New Zealand’s unique position. A recent Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) paper highlighted the crucial intersection between global systemic risk and global catastrophic risk. Nuclear war, extreme pandemics, and supervolcano eruptions don’t just interact with existing vulnerabilities—their effects can amplify through global systems to produce catastrophic outcomes. These systems include many that are not traditionally considered in climate change mitigation and adaptation thinking.
For New Zealand, this intersection is critical. Our geographic isolation, which provides some protection from certain risks (eg pandemics), also creates unique vulnerabilities.
At the Forum, war emerged repeatedly as a barrier to resilience building, not just in Ukraine, but as a persistent drain on political attention and resources. Politicians are overwhelmed by war considerations across multiple theatres. This must be curtailed if humanity is to ensure resilience to the systemic and catastrophic risk we have created. War is accelerating humanity’s race to the bottom.
Lessons for New Zealand Urban Resilience Policy
New Zealand needs to consider the full and real consequences of escalating global war, potential global systemic failures, and the other varied hazards, vulnerabilities, amplifying and latent factors that contribute to global catastrophic risk, especially from the perspective of a remote island nation.
As well as asking how our cities can resist the effects of flooding, cyclones, and heat, while reducing emissions, we also need to be investing in ways to prevent disruption due to lack of industrial inputs like fuel, fertiliser and imported spare parts. We should design our vital systems to be self-contained, diverse, and resilient. We need to anticipate the demands of communications in the event of catastrophic internet failure, how to transport and process food with limited liquid fuel, and how to mitigate harmful mis- and dis-information, and a host of other system wide risks.
New Zealand’s resilience planning must extend beyond climate adaptation and economic resilience to address global catastrophic risks. This means ensuring that vital urban systems—electricity, energy, food supply, transport of critical goods—can operate at minimum levels post-catastrophe. It’s more than planting trees or providing heat shelters; it’s about maintaining basic human needs (like water, food, shelter, energy, transport, communications) when global systems fail. Action such as that which Rotterdam is taking, described by Maarten Nypels, was one of the few examples of genuine resilience building across risks that I heard at the Forum.
New Zealand’s new Space Weather plan, developed by NEMA, exemplifies this challenge. The plan focuses on response but it needs integration with the likes of the Infrastructure Commission’s long-term infrastructure plan to ensure that we’re not stuck in cycles of response and recovery, but rather we build out resilient solutions ahead of time. In London response and recovery teams are now co-located with resilience and prevention teams. NEMA must work with the Infrastructure Commission, and consider systemic risk beyond climate adaptation.
To achieve this upstream investment, finance sessions at the Forum emphasised that investors need detailed plans and predictable contexts. Cities will only be resilient if they’re resilient to the spectrum of Anthropocene risk. For New Zealand, this means building resilience systems that work whether the challenge is climate change, pandemics, or potential Northern Hemisphere nuclear conflict. It means ensuring our remote location becomes a strength rather than a vulnerability.
The conference’s emphasis on Chief Resilience Officers and acceleration of implementation has particular relevance for New Zealand and resonates with much of our previous work, such as our call for a Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risks. Our cities need systematic approaches to resilience that acknowledge our unique vulnerabilities while learning from innovations in Europe and elsewhere.
Judges dispensing sustainability awards at the Forum were clear, that the time of pilot projects is over. Winning entries were visionary, and aimed at changing the mechanics of cities fundamentally.
Conclusions
Much was said and shared at the European Urban Resilience Forum, and I have necessarily focused on just a few themes, namely the need to incorporate an understanding of global systemic and global catastrophic risk in urban resilience programmes.
The Forum demonstrated that the solutions exist, but we need the political will to implement them at scale. For New Zealand, the imperative is clear: we must build resilience systems that address not just the climate crisis, but the full spectrum of global catastrophic risks that could affect our remote island nation.
Perhaps most striking for New Zealand observers is how geopolitical instability emerged as a defining constraint on resilience planning. Ukrainian representatives highlighted the cruel paradox of needing to build climate resilience while resources are diverted to immediate survival. This reality check extends beyond Ukraine—panellists repeatedly noted how global conflicts from Israel and Gaza to Iran to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning.
For New Zealand, this raises fundamental questions about how our geographic remoteness might be both shield and vulnerability in an era where Northern Hemisphere conflicts, extreme pandemics, or other global catastrophic risks could profoundly impact our resilience assumptions and supply chains. A new wave of resilience action needs to address global systemic and catastrophic risk.
A Tale of Two Conferences Part II: ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium 2025
(In-depth read, 15 min)
The importance of nature was clear at Les Fontaines – venue for the ASRA Symposium. Photo credit: the author
TLDR/Summary
Part II of a two-part blog series reporting on a pair of crisis/disaster risk conferences – this one covers the ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium, which offered a refreshing contrast to the UN’s symptom-focused approach detailed in Part I.
ASRA brought systems thinking to crisis management – 250 multidisciplinary experts tackled interconnected “polycrisis” issues rather than isolated disasters, focusing on the deeper stresses that drive cascading failures.
Keynote speakers delivered transformation-focused messages – Poet Ben Okri challenged humanity to become “the people our times require,” while Christiana Figueres emphasised that “linear thinking has no place” in addressing systemic risk.
Practical tools emerged alongside theory – ASRA launched STEER, a beta tool for systemic risk assessment, and workshops demonstrated hands-on polycrisis analysis and intervention design using real global stresses and future scenarios.
The hard truth: single solutions won’t work – Whether it’s capitalism, carbon emissions, or specific leaders, there’s no single root cause to our interconnected crises; siloed institutions impede the interdisciplinary approaches we desperately need.
Bottom line: humanity has the frameworks and community, but the race against time continues – ASRA provided genuine hope and practical starting points, but whether this scales fast enough to prevent humanity’s “hard landing” remains the crucial question.
Definitions
Global systemic stresses: long-term processes that weaken the resilience of critical global systems by increasing pressures, sharpening contradictions, and expanding vulnerabilities. These stresses make systems more vulnerable to trigger events that push them into a crisis.
Polycrisis: The simultaneous occurrence of multiple, interconnected crises that exacerbate each other, creating a situation more severe than the sum of its parts. It’s not just a collection of unrelated crises, but rather a situation where different crises interact and amplify the negative impacts of each other.
Systemic risk: The potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems. Systemic risk implies the potential for system-level breakdown and cascading consequences across human and natural systems.
Metacrisis: In this blog ‘metacrisis’ refers to the collection of forces: evolutionary, social, technological, and game theoretic, that drive and give rise to global systemic stresses, and resulting crises, polycrisis, and systemic risk.
Introduction & Context
Twenty-four hours after leaving the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Platform in Geneva, somewhat pessimistic about humanity’s trajectory, I found myself at Les Fontaines in Chantilly Gouvieaux, France, for an entirely different kind of gathering.
The Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) was hosting the ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium – the first transdisciplinary global meeting dedicated to action on systemic risk.
The Symposium offered what the UNDRR Global Platform appeared to miss: clear-eyed analysis of the deeper and interconnected stresses driving cascading crises, coupled with actionable frameworks for addressing them.
ASRA represents a fresh approach to global catastrophic risk. As a network of 90 transdisciplinary experts, it brought together 250 systemic risk practitioners and stakeholders to tackle what ASRA defines as systemic risk: “the potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems.”
Unlike traditional disaster risk conferences focusing on specific hazards, ASRA addressed the underlying patterns generating cascading failures across interconnected systems. The goal: prevent, mitigate, adapt, and transform away from systemic risk before it overwhelms humanity’s response capacity.
Opening Address: Ben Okri’s Call for Transformation
Ben Okri delivers the opening address at ASRA’s Symposium. Photo credit: the author.
British/Nigerian poet and author Ben Okri gave the opening keynote, a moving, powerful account of humanity’s current predicament that immediately distinguished this gathering from conventional policy conferences. As a renowned novelist, Okri brought a different lens that cut through technocratic language to human realities.
“Many things have come into reality that cannot sustain themselves,” Okri observed – capturing what metacrisis theorist Daniel Schmachtenberger had described as humanity’s “self-terminating race” (see Part I).
But rather than dwelling in despair, Okri challenged humanity towards transformation thinking: “We must not make the mistake of thinking that the present will become the future.”
His diagnosis was unflinching. “Nations cannot talk of making themselves ‘great’ at the expense of making the rest of humanity small,” directly addressing the zero-sum thinking that underlies the competitive dynamics driving many global systemic stresses.
Most crucially: “We cannot combat the difficulty of our times as the people we used to be, we have to be fit and healthy, and we have to create wider and wider communities and alliances and we have to fight the evil of our times intelligently.”
This call for intelligent, collaborative action echoed throughout the Symposium’s technical sessions.
Keynote: Christiana Figueres on Transformative Change
The first keynote session saw Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris Agreement, demonstrate how systemic thinking translates into concrete action. Her presentation exemplified the Symposium’s approach of inclusive systematic analysis with practical optimism.
“In the face of systemic risk, linear thinking has no place today,” Figueres began, directly addressing the siloed thinking that limited many of the UNDRR discussions I had attended the previous week (see Part I).
We have the technology and understand interconnectedness, she continued, the question is implementation. Furthermore, rather than aiming to minimise our impact, we should actively seek to restore nature, shifting from ‘sustaining’ to ‘regenerating.’
Costa Rica provided her key example, where laws now facilitate payment for environmental services, resulting in increased forest cover from 29% to 55%. This demonstrates how changing incentive structures drives systemic change.
Figueres used the metaphor of a spider web for interactions in complex systems, explaining that we can’t control the web through top-down decrees, but we can observe “which threads are being pulled and how” and identify effects and leverage points where small changes create large systemic shifts.
Christiana Figueres speaking at the 2025 ASRA Symposium. Photo: the author.
Most importantly, Figueres identified a crucial constraint: “The scarcest resources at the moment are kindness and love.” She warned against letting news feeds crowd out genuine learning sources, including learning from the natural world. In a similar vein, I’ve previously blogged on Jaron Lanier’s calls for deleting all your social media ‘right now’, in my post on Covid, Trump, and algorithms.
Panel Discussions: Scale, Speed, and Systemic Solutions
ASRA Symposium panels tackled how we can meet the scale, scope and speed required for transformation. Unlike conferences focusing on incremental improvements, panellists grappled directly with the need to change human systems.
Participants spoke of bold actions, trust, and “crazy imagination.” One participant noted that, “change happens at the speed of trust,” and “we need to be good ancestors, that’s all.”
But the panellists also honestly assessed barriers, noting for example that Ministers of Finance lack technical understanding of systemic risk. We need bold moves in building systemic resilience so that human systems can handle the stress of the transformation that is required to reduce risk in the long term. However, the current efficiency vs resilience trade-off balance is wrong – we’ve built fragile systems optimised for short-term performance. We must stress-test our systems (whether financial, trade, food, or whatever vital system) and ask if the future we’re creating is resilient to the shocks that are increasingly likely. These stress tests require facilitated dialogue and knowledge sharing across the sectors and systems.
On the required foresight, participants emphasized anticipatory governance as key. Long-term efficiency comes through resilience, not optimisation, because iterated disasters and shocks will undermine efficient systems more over time than resilient systems.
Unfortunately, current crisis response follows whack-a-mole patterns addressing symptoms not causes. Humanity lacks the appropriate anticipatory governance, mechanisms to effect system redesign, and cross-border, regional and global coordination. In particular, we need to stop trying to solve global problems with national tools (as this will lead us into the game theoretic traps and harmful zero-sum dynamics).
“We shouldn’t fix the past, we need to build the future. It was these old systems that have led us here,” noted one panellist. Furthermore, we should act with “good enough information and fast enough action” rather than delays in search of perfect knowledge and optimal decisions.
The way the world seems stuck in rigid historical frames and decision processes, maladaptive in a present world of crisis and existential threats, reminds me of a scene in the film No Country for Old Men. Once he has outwitted the hero, villain Anton Chigurh observes:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
The world and its legacy rule-based institutions appear to be in a similar bind. A new system of rules and processes is needed, or humanity will be brought “to this”.
Anton Chigurh, the villain in No Country for Old Men, challenges humanity to reflect on our systems and processes. Miramax Films (2007).
Launch of the STEER Tool: Practical Systemic Risk Assessment & Response
At the Symposium, ASRA launched STEER (Systemic Tool to Explore and Evaluate Risks), a tool designed to help users ‘steer’ away from systemic crisis and toward solutions.
Currently in beta, STEER will make systemic risk assessment accessible to organisations, governments, and researchers across all systems and sectors.
STEER represents practical systems thinking and helps users map interconnections (systemic risk assessment) and identify intervention points (systemic risk responses) for systemic impact, rather than analysing risks in isolation. A combination of drop down menus, tutorial material, and prompts for reflection and action guide users through the processes of systemic risk assessment and response.
STEER will be publicly launched later this year, but feedback from conference attendees (all experts on systemic risk) beta testing the platform was very positive.
The ASRA Symposium provided opportunities for attendees to engage in the kind of processes that STEER encourages, through various workshops and side-events. I managed to attend two of these.
Workshop 1: Understanding Systemic Risk as Polycrisis
I participated in a breakout session facilitated by the Cascade Institute. This provided a hands-on polycrisis analysis exercise. The workshop highlighted global stresses and groups plotted possible interactions among these along with the triggers that could tip such interactions into crises. This helps us understand why so much is going wrong at the same time.
The theoretical basis for the Cascade Institute’s approach is their stress-trigger-crisis model. The model shows that stresses push systems toward points where triggers might create disequilibrium (and likely associated harm in human and ecological systems). Even without triggers, inexorable stressors will push systems into potentially harmful new states (eg, as the left hand depression in the figure below becomes shallower). Averting crises requires acting on stresses of three types: pressures, contradictions, and vulnerabilities.
Figure credit: Cascade Institute’s ‘Stress-Trigger-Crisis’ model (2024)
The Institute previously identified 14 global systemic stresses which create cascading failure conditions for humanity, and which must be addressed to have hope of mitigating the present polycrisis (you can read more about these here):
Climate heating
Ecological degradation
Toxicity
Zoonotic disease transfer
Demographic divergence
Concentrated industrial food production
Changing energy supply
Financial interconnectedness
Economic headwinds
Economic inequality
Ideological fragmentation and polarization
Political-institutional decay
Great power hegemonic transition
Propagation of artificial intelligence
Working groups mapped interactions between three assigned stressors each, analysing how crises emerge when triggers act within these interactions. Each crisis can become a trigger within other patterns.
The messy but structured and necessary process to understand complex systemic risk. Photo credit: the author.
For example, my group was tasked with considering interactions among:
North-South demographic divergence
The concentrated nature of industrial food production
Rising economic inequality
Interactions between these factors could be stressed further by events such as a policy shift in migration settings, or synchronous heatwaves in critical food production regions, leading to a crisis of workforce availability and food production, resulting in famine or war, with these crises then being the triggers of other global crises in cascading fashion.
The exercise rapidly demonstrated how current conditions create multiple, interacting, cascading failures – a polycrisis rather than isolated events. And we only considered three of the 14 global stresses!
Crucially, we brainstormed interventions for crisis mitigation through anticipatory action, such as sensible migration policies, sustainability criteria on imports, more heterogeneous distributed food systems, with food system buffers, and policies that alleviate economic inequality to hedge against short-term price shocks.
Key insight: There’s no single root cause of a polycrisis. It is not simply capitalism, carbon emissions, or the actions of particular leaders, but everything in conjunction. Single-point solutions won’t work. Siloed institutions impede solutions, which require interdisciplinary complex systems thinking.
Workshop 2: Preparing for Catastrophic System Failure
Another workshop facilitated by David Korowicz addressed whether catastrophic system failure can be mitigated ahead of time. We contemplated a scenario where (for the purposes of the foresight exercise) a national Cabinet has knowledge that a catastrophe severely decreasing goods, services, and energy access will happen in either 1, 4, or 8 years. Our group was tasked with considering how we would act with such information under the 4-year time horizon.
Roughly the results of our deliberations can be summarised as follows:
Prevent panic while being clear resilience is a fundamental priority and the nation needs to start seriously working to mitigate likely effects of future crises.
Assess physical security and available resources, ensuring physical safety and liaising with trusted international partners.
Strengthen connections at all levels across government and society (families, communities, regions, international).
Analyse complex reactions to crisis – how will people and countries respond? Will there be national hoarding with export controls? Ensure appropriate engagement with behavioural scientists.
Map consequences for energy, transport, food, and communications systems.
Stocktake the minimum functions required to sustain society according to hierarchy of needs (water, food, shelter, energy, etc).
Develop mitigation options for each critical function in context of the catastrophe.
Ensure redundant structures for communications, food, shelter.
Strategic stockpiling while understanding supply constraints from other jurisdictions doing the same.
Roll out incentives for electrification, local biofuels, distributed food production, and other resilience measures.
Sequence and prioritise all interventions for maximum effectiveness.
Admittedly all the above were developed on the fly in half an hour, but the exercise raised two key questions for me.
First, this all sounded incredibly familiar, and is basically the content of our own organisation’s detailed report on New Zealand’s vulnerability and resilience options against the risk of Northern Hemisphere nuclear war.
Recent media reporting on our study can be found here. You can read the rich and detailed report here, which is effectively a maturity model for resilience to global catastrophic risks, including one-page ‘cheat sheets’ for each key sector and for global catastrophic risk management.
Second, why haven’t governments of the world conducted this kind of exercise, and developed and implemented exactly these plans and programmes, in conjunction with their citizens, given the perilous state of the world?
The workshop discussions also highlighted that this kind of resilience doesn’t depend on nationalistic self-sufficiency but on creating systems that are less susceptible to cascading collapses: locally resilient food and energy, regional governance, delinking from fragile global finance, mutual support networks. But also, and importantly, linkages with regional partners, collaborations of nations to ensure trade and supply through investment in strategic infrastructure and plans, and the avoidance of hoarding, which although seems rational for individual jurisdictions, could actually lower the global mean ability to ride out the crisis, creating overall more harm.
Addressing the Causes of Global Systemic Stresses themselves
The workshops demonstrated that there are positive steps humanity can take towards limiting future catastrophe harm, even harm stemming from system-wide failures. We can implement systems thinking, map systemic interactions, develop resilience through anticipatory governance, conduct preparedness exercises, and reduce the human and environmental impact, and therefore depth of the economic harm that global systemic risk threatens.
ASRA’s greatest contribution was acknowledging this challenge while providing concrete intervention tools. Much more work is needed, particularly to address what drives these global stresses, including rivalrous dynamics preventing coordination, exponential technological advancement creating risks faster than assessment is possible, and resource degradation amid coordination failures. The impact of global stress reduction through systems thinking and action may still not be enough, because civilisation’s underlying dynamics don’t support such action. We’re potentially stuck in evolutionarily stable strategies where aggressive, exploitative behaviours outcompete cooperative, long-term alternatives – even when cooperation ensures collective survival.
All that said, the frameworks discussed and exercised at the ASRA Symposium offer genuine starting points for a new cognitive frame and for systemic intervention.
Conclusion: Building on Systemic Foundations
The contrast between the UNDRR Global Platform and the ASRA Symposium was striking and illuminates the limitations of current disaster risk reduction efforts, which are probably largely driven by historic silos.
While UNDRR demonstrated genuine commitment to developing resilience, discussion remained trapped within frameworks addressing symptoms rather than systems. ASRA took a fundamentally different approach, placing difficult systemic questions at the analytic heart. The result was honest assessment combined with practical intervention tools.
Most importantly, ASRA provided a transformation-focused community of practice. The Symposium demonstrated that systemic risk assessment isn’t an abstract academic exercise. It’s an urgent practical necessity for decision-makers navigating interconnected worlds where risks cascade faster than traditional approaches can address. This practical necessity needs to be resourced. Analysts and decision-makers across all vital sectors and systems need time and space to cooperate, coordinate, and hash-out these problems around the same table.
The challenge of disaster risk reduction, building immunity to global catastrophic risks, and transforming human systems away from those that generate these risks remains enormous. Changing competitive dynamics and evolutionarily stable strategies requires changes from individual consciousness right up to global governance.
We can respond and recover from various crises, we can build resilience and mitigate the impact of future crises, we can reduce systemic risk through judicious systems transformation, we can mitigate the polycrisis by minimising the global systemic stresses, but only by intervening on the forces comprising the metacrisis can we prevent global stresses and crises being thrown up again and again, in increasingly severe form.
I reported Daniel Schmachtenberger’s views in Part I. He notes that the race dynamics of humanity are self-terminating. Individual improvement is insufficient – we need to bend the entire arc of human history. Ben Okri echoed this at ASRA: “We have to find better alternatives to the current direction of history.”
But frameworks, tools, and community emerging from initiatives like ASRA provide hopeful foundations and Ben Okri’s challenge echoes as warning and invitation. We cannot combat our times’ difficulties as the people we used to be, but we can choose to become the people our times require.
Whether this mindset and process scales and accelerates quickly enough to bend the arc of human history before the “hard landing” becomes inevitable remains the question.
Listing to Port: Is this the marketplace for interisland ships NZ has been browsing? (Image credit: ChatGPT)
TLDR/Summary
NZ’s interisland and coastal shipping infrastructure is inadequate for global catastrophe scenarios that limit international shipping or liquid fuel supply to NZ.
The recent history of failures including ferries and coastal ships highlights the vulnerability of interisland connections to any loss of component supply or international expertise.
NZ heavily relies on road trucking (93%), which is fuel-inefficient and vulnerable to disrupted fuel supply or road damage.
Coastal shipping capacity is low, limiting transport options.
Key resilience options to protect against global catastrophic risks: Upgrade and diversify the interisland ferry fleet; Expand and modernise coastal shipping capabilities; Develop local biofuel production for shipping; Accelerate transport electrification; Improve rail infrastructure, including interisland rail capacity; Create redundancy in transport systems.
Benefits include: improved catastrophe resilience, reduced emissions, better preparedness for various disasters.
Introduction
Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) is supposedly a seafaring nation, but in case of a global catastrophe our interisland and coastal shipping infrastructure is far from being up to scratch.
Global catastrophic risks such as nuclear war, supervolcano eruptions, extreme pandemics, cyberattacks and solar storms threaten global infrastructure and could precipitate the collapse of global trade (see for example our Hazard Profile on nuclear war and NZ). NZ is the ‘last bus stop on the route’ and could suffer immense consequences that accelerate the risk of societal collapse.
NZ’s transport infrastructure is extremely dependent on imported liquid fuel supplies, but also imported components for maintenance and repair. In the case of an extended period of trade isolation, the country may struggle to fuel and repair transport assets such as ships.
This is particularly concerning given NZ’s recent track record of shipping maintenance woes, poor liquid fuel security status, and NZ’s extreme dependence on road trucking for transport.
NZ needs to upgrade its shipping infrastructure and secure a minimum locally produced shipping fuel supply as a national public priority. This is to ensure food and essential commodities can be distributed around the country even in a severe global catastrophe.
For resilience, NZ would ideally use a balanced mix of transport options such as efficient locally controlled coastal shipping, electric rail, road trucking, and trans-Tasman shipping options that don’t depend on global shipping routes. However, at present NZ is 93% dependent on the least fuel-efficient option of road trucking (which can consume double the fuel per container moved than rail or shipping).
Road trucking in turn is dependent on functioning and resilient Cook Strait ferries. But these ferries have a track record of failures in recent times, and in a global catastrophe, it may not be possible to conduct repairs that depend on imported parts and international expertise.
To avoid isolating the North from South Island, the interisland ferry fleet needs to be diverse, modern, well-maintained, have high capacity and redundancy. It also needs a secure fuel supply that doesn’t depend completely on imported liquid fuels.
The Problem
The history of interisland ferry failures is worrying (see supporting links after this blog):
In 1999 the Aratere suffered power failures shortly after entering service.
In 2005, the Arahura experienced a major loss of propulsion power approaching Tory channel due to failure of a diesel generator.
In 2006, the Aratere developed a significant list due to shifting cargo in heavy weather, causing minor injuries.
In 2013, the Aratere was taken out of service after a fatigue fracture caused it to lose a propeller while crossing Cook Strait.
In 2021, the Kaiārahi experienced a major gear box failure during a Cook Strait crossing.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, there were sporadic cancellations across both Interislander and Bluebridge services due to various mechanical issues.
In 2023 the Kaiārahi and Connemara both faced “engineering issues” in February causing widespread cancellations.
In 2023, the Kaitaki lost all power due to a cooling system leak, drifting dangerously close to Wellington’s south coast, with Wellington hospital going on alert for potential mass casualties.
In 2023, the Kaitaki was out of service again with a gear box problem that required overseas experts to be flown in.
In 2024 the Aratere ran aground in the Marlborough Sounds after a steering failure.
In 2024 the Connemara lost power and started drifting in Cook Strait.
In 2024 the Strait Feronia lost power coming into Wellington Harbour.
There have also been multiple incidents of ferries colliding with wharves or other vessels.
These issues have resulted in frequent cancellations, delays, and stranded passengers, vehicles and freight. Plans to replace the aging ferries in the Interislander fleet with new hybrid-electric ferries failed to materialise and now the government has scrapped a planned upgrade to new vessels.
In response, KiwiRail announced increased ferry maintenance and scheduled longer periods in dry docks for serious maintenance work. Also, international experts were consulted to assess the ships’ conditions and provide recommendations. KiwiRail has considered alternative options, including extending the life of existing ferries, leasing or buying second-hand ferries, and exploring new ferry designs with reduced landside requirements. Though none of these is a comprehensive and long-term resilience solution.
KiwiRail did report 97% ship availability and 85% on-time performance in February 2024, but as noted above, a single mechanical failure, or inability to access fuel could be disastrous for NZ’s connectedness in a global catastrophe. Redundancy and the ability to troubleshoot locally are critical.
Importantly, the problems are not limited to interisland shipping. It is recognised that NZ has low coastal shipping capacity and efforts to improve coastal shipping services have also met with failures. For example, a ‘she’ll be right’ NZ attitude to fitting out a beleaguered coastal barge ended in disaster this year as it ran aground near Westport immediately after being put to service.
We note Waka Kotahi’s Freight and Supply Chain Strategy. There is a 3-year plan to analyse port connections, and a plan across 30 years to strengthen parts of the freight and supply chain system that are critical to national interest, but global catastrophe could strike at any moment. We applaud the goal of more freight being transported by rail and coastal shipping rather than road, but there is yet little evidence of sweeping improvements in resilience.
Future NZ Shipping? (Image credit: Midjourney)
Catastrophe Resilient Solutions
In 2023 we produced a report on increasing NZ’s resilience to global catastrophe. In the chapter on transport, we provided resilience options including the need to:
Accelerate electrification, including electric road and rail transport, short haul coastal shipping, and interisland air travel.
Invest in research and development of the optimal methods for producing transport fuel locally in NZ, for example biofuel feedstocks such as canola, and developing food oil factories that can convert to biodiesel production.
Explore how coastal shipping might employ wind assist technology to conserve fuel, be capable of running on biofuels, and quantify the minimum liquid fuel needs for shipping to move the most essential goods (eg, food) around NZ.
Develop principles of land transport and shipping fuel rationing based on prioritisation of population basic needs in a global catastrophe.
Collaborate with Australia on global catastrophe resilience to ensure that trans-Tasman trade can continue using just assets controlled by NZ and Australia.
Interisland Ferry Resilience and Redundancy
NZ needs reliable and resilient interisland shipping options, that are flexible enough to move people, freight, trucks and rail assets, and modern and reliable enough that the risk of irreparable breakdown is extremely low. There needs to be capacity and redundancy in the system.
There are concerns that any Cook Strait ferry solution will not be rail capable. Ideally interisland ferry solutions would accommodate future emphasis on electric rail. If the North and South islands are disconnected, NZ risks a less resilient rail system (as rail assets or repair workshops may be stranded on one island or the other).
Rail, especially electric rail, may be particularly important in a global catastrophe if fuel and transport options are scarce, as it allows intensive near-urban agriculture to follow a railway, as we have argued in our research paper on near urban agriculture for resilience.
Coastal Shipping Assets and Infrastructure
At present it is more cost-effective to ship Australian wheat to processing in Auckland than bring wheat from the South Island, but we cannot assume that trans-Tasman transport will be operational following a global catastrophe. Reliable and sufficient NZ bulk, liquid, and container coastal shipping assets are strategically important.
NZ needs an expanded, capable, flexible and reliable coastal shipping fleet, and associated port infrastructure, perhaps including roll-on, roll-off capability for trucks and rail at a range of ports. This would provide transport resilience, reduced emissions and fuel efficiencies. Yet there are doubts about NZ’s coastal shipping capability and capacity and a lot of ‘coastal’ transport in NZ depends on vessels plying global routes.
Liquid Fuel Supply for Shipping
Shipping is more fuel efficient than road transport in most cases and can be markedly so when a full load of containers is transported. However, shipping still requires a significant amount of liquid fuel.
We’ve previously calculated that as little as 5–15 million litres of locally produced biofuel could power agricultural equipment sufficient to produce food for the entire NZ population (if efficient crops such as wheat are grown near processing and consumption sites – with many more litres needed for producing food such as dairy products).
In contrast the annual fuel consumption of a single ship to distribute food is in the order of 10 million litres. Such a ship (eg, like the MV Moana Chief) can ply coastal routes and is trans-Tasman capable. Some ships can run on 100% biodiesel (B100), but regulatory changes and certifications would be needed to permit this. We estimate that local production would require at least 8,000 hectares of canola crop or some other biofuel feedstock for every 10 million litres of biodiesel. Such considerations need to be part of a comprehensive mixed transport resilience plan and essential quantities compiled in an improved National Fuel Plan.
These liquid fuel volumes need to be put in the context of the amount of biodiesel that previously operating refineries could produce. One refinery in NZ is capable of producing in the order of 10–20 million litres of biodiesel per annum, however it has now switched to producing food oil.
We commend a new agreement for a biofuel refinery at Marsden Point, but from a diversification and resilience perspective NZ needs to produce a wide range of fuels (for aviation, shipping, agricultural machinery etc) and the problem of interisland transportation of this fuel remains. Biofuel refineries would ideally be in both North and South islands, at least until more widespread electrification of agriculture and road transport occurs.
One concrete possibility is to begin by pursuing the potentially low hanging fruit of marine fuel. Canola feedstock in Canterbury with the potential for wheat rotation crops (to expand production), could supply the Rolleston PureOil NZ refinery which could produce marine fuel with linkage to Lyttleton for a single NZ marine bunker. Multiple refining and bunker nodes would be ideal, and additional opportunities should be sought.
Infrastructure Commission Proposals
The NZ Infrastructure Commission is calling for submissions to its Infrastructure Priorities Programme (first round due 20 December 2024). Submissions can include ‘Stage 1’ proposals that detail major problems (of national significance) that NZ faces. We contest that resilient coastal and interisland shipping is one such priority issue and we encourage people to submit proposals for infrastructure that will enhance the resilience of NZ’s interisland and coastal shipping in the face of potential global catastrophe. Solutions might include interisland or coastal vessels, landside infrastructure, trans-Tasman trade options, and solutions for a resilient shipping fuel supply.
The country cannot assume that help, expertise and components from overseas will be easily available when needed after a global catastrophe. Distribution of food, fuel, and medicines depends on a resilient local transport system. Indeed, all industrial systems are interdependent and without reliable shipping every sector would break down in a multi-island nation. There is potential for widespread societal harms in a catastrophe that accrue well beyond the accounting in shipping industry risk processes. The right resilience incentives are lacking and this means there may be a case for government ownership of some strategically critical shipping assets.
Finally, the suggestions above would likely help provide a range of immediate benefits to the country. These include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increase transport security, and providing resilience to a wider class of natural hazards such as extreme weather or earthquakes.
Further recent media about NZ shipping problems and solutions
This study is to be commended, but the contractor needs to include analyses through the lens of ‘Global Catastrophic Risks’.
Zero liquid fuel import scenarios are possible and must be contemplated. This is the appropriate ‘first principles’ starting point for analysis of fuel security.
Mitigation options need to provide for minimal fuel requirements across months or even years.
New Zealand imports nearly all its engine fuels, except for small amounts of biofuels.
Therefore, the NZ Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) is:
Seeking specialist services to undertake a Fuel Security Study on fuel security requirements for New Zealand out to 2035. The findings from the Fuel Security Study will feed into the development of a Fuel Security Plan which will be a strategy document for building resilience in the medium to long term.
This blog outlines some potential global catastrophes and suggests that the contractor undertaking the fuel study should apply the lens of global catastrophic risks to address national fuel security in the worst potential scenarios.
Fuel security is essential to the economy, but also to national food security to ensure farm machinery works and food is transported to people.
Global Catastrophic Risks and Fuel Security
NZ’s geography provides potential for a degree of national self-sufficiency in energy and food production. However, economic drivers mean that NZ depends on trade for many essential goods and services, including liquid fuel.
This arrangement is efficient in normal times but may not provide sufficient resilience should trade networks degrade or collapse. The deteriorating world geopolitical situation in 2024, along with the ever-present risk of major catastrophes such as nuclear war, extreme pandemics, global food shocks, and industry disabling technological or cyber disasters, necessitate a measure of national resilience.
Against this backdrop the coalition agreement between the National Party and NZ First mandated a study of NZ’s fuel security. Proposals for this analysis are now being sought by MBIE (due on 25 June 2024).
The government and MBIE should be commended for initiating this critical work.
A secure and resilient supply of engine fuels is critical to our economy. A significant and sustained supply disruption of engine fuels would impact industry and cause significant hardship to New Zealanders.
‘Critical to our economy’ possibly doesn’t capture the full extent of NZ’s dependence on liquid fuel imports.
A short interruption to liquid fuel supply could be mitigated by demand reduction and judicious distribution of onshore fuel stockholdings. But an extended collapse of fuel trade would put agricultural production and food distribution at risk.
Liquid fuel, at present, is ‘critical to our survival’.
Among wide-ranging multi-sector options, NZCat suggested that NZ needs to:
Reverse the trend to decreased energy self-sufficiency, and ensure adequate electrified transport/machinery and local liquid fuel production to supply essential needs in a global catastrophe.
Specific analyses identified the potential for a modest national production of biofuel that could be titrated to absolute minimum needs to support agricultural production of the most efficient crops to ensure food for New Zealanders. NZCat recommended that other sectors perform similar calculations of critical minima.
Additionally, the NZ Productivity Commission (before its disestablishment) included the following box in their 2024 report on Improving Economic Resilience (p.24)
NZ Productivity Commission 2024
The Productivity Commission highlights the centralised oversight of risk management in NZ and any Fuel Security Study needs to contemplate the full range of potential catastrophes, and feed results into central planning across interdependent sectors and agencies.
It is clear from the scenarios described above, that recent analyses of NZ’s fuel security have not gone far enough in considering the potential magnitude of fuel shocks.
Past studies MBIE commissioned from 2005 on tested only one external supply constraint – a uniform 10% cut in crude production for 6 months. And this was treated as resulting in simply a price effect. I welcome MBIE’s new study.
The 2024 NZ Fuel Security Study
MBIE’s RFP lays out the following objectives for the Fuel Security Study:
Identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in NZ’s fuel supply chain
Enable us to minimise the impact of fuel disruption events
Investigate how NZ could improve sovereign fuel resilience
Maintain available fuel at an affordable price
Furthermore, the project scope requires the consultants to:
Investigate the reopening of the Marsden Point oil refinery
Investigate the strategic importance of infrastructure at Marsden Point and the role it could play in underpinning NZ’s fuel resilience
Understand the risks, impacts and mitigation measures of an extended fuel supply shortage
Understand potential domestic disruptions to fuel distribution
Map fuel consumption trends and how they could impact fuel security
If I was undertaking this Fuel Security Study, as well as investigating the key factors MBIE has identified, I would ensure the following analyses are included:
Contemplate scenarios where NZ suffers a complete loss of liquid fuel imports. This could arise because of massive destruction of refineries/ports/bunkers worldwide (eg, nuclear war), a total regional shipping blockade (eg, China-Taiwan conflict), catastrophic disruption to electrical systems (massive solar flare, cyber disaster), or any one of several other scenarios.
Ideally, the cascading impacts of the scenarios in (1) could be modelled through country-level network node analysis of fuel production, import and export volumes, as has been done for global food trade (eg, Hedlund et al. 2022), to estimate the impact of various representative catastrophes on NZ’s fuel supply.
Contemplate protracted (months/years) fuel supply disruptions and consider essential services that could be disrupted, starting from the most critical basic needs, ie, water supply, agricultural production/food distribution, and heating.
Estimate the quantities of liquid fuel required by each critical sector (eg, Transport, Energy, Communications, Food/Agriculture, Emergency Services, Defence, etc) to sustain absolute bare-minimum functioning to supply survival needs across months/years. These volumes can then inform a quantified and updated National Fuel Plan.
Investigate mitigation measures that include local production of liquid fuels. Until widespread electrification (which should be pursued) liquid fuel is critical to NZ’s survival. Local production options at the required scale are probably limited at present to:
Refining local crude oil (from Taranaki)
Biofuel production
Suggest options for how to develop mitigation measures for fuel supply shocks, including the potential for:
Pilot programmes of incentivised biofuel production
R&D on electrification of critical industries
Alternative fuel production
Infrastructure decentralisation
Other innovative solutions
Estimate in broad terms the cost-effectiveness of various interventions. The cost-effectiveness analysis should include:
A societal perspective (because costs and benefits are not limited to the fuel industries directly and this analysis would demonstrate the potential return on investment for public funding of fuel resilience).
The collective likelihood (across the lifetime of fuel supply infrastructure) and impact of rare but devastating global catastrophes, such as extreme pandemics, nuclear war, supervolcano eruptions, solar flares, AI powered cyber-attacks, Great Power war, etc (ie, analysis of costs should account for expected value of the largest disasters).
If I was undertaking the Fuel Security Study, I would consult the following resources, which help frame these issues at a high level, through the lens of potential global catastrophe, from a NZ perspective:
I would also ensure that the study is framed such that it can inform NZ’s list of Nationally Significant Risks. As the coordinator of NZ’s risk management strategy, DPMC maintains this list (and a confidential National Risk Register). The impact of global catastrophes that could end NZ’s fuel supply needs to be spelled out, so that these can be included in lists of the most important risks NZ faces. The analysis should be publicly facing, so that communities and businesses can respond accordingly.
The first step for a fuel security study is to start from first principles and understand the implications of a zero-fuel scenario. Then priority actions can be identified.
Again, MBIE is to be congratulated for progressing this important work, and hopefully a resilient and thriving NZ emerges, rather than a nation critically dependent for survival on systems beyond our control.
Adapt Research Ltd 