The New Zealand Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake an inquiry into the resilience of the New Zealand economy to supply chain disruptions. The major risks to New Zealand are those that arise elsewhere and impact the entire world. Adapt Research and the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat) have made a detailed submission to this inquiry.

Summary/TLDR Risk and New Zealand Risk analysis will be topical in New Zealand in 2023 argues a recent opinion by former NZ Chief Science Adviser Sir Peter Gluckman and Dr Anne Bardsley: Risk listening: rethinking how we understand and manage risk Ongoing disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic, and more recently extreme weather in the form … Continue reading "Yes, NZ needs a systematic National Risk Assessment; but we must not repeat others’ mistakes"

By Matt Boyd & Nick Wilson Summary/TLDR: This post is a partial and high-level summary of our research paper on national risk assessment (NRA) published in the academic journal Risk Analysis in March 2023. This post also places our work in the context of another recent report on NRA identifying common ground. Consider reading our … Continue reading "Revolutionising National Risk Assessment (NRA): improved methods and stakeholder engagement to tackle global catastrophe and existential risks"

Nick Wilson & Matt Boyd Summary / TLDR: Our Study of the 1815 Mt Tambora eruption Catastrophes such as nuclear war and large magnitude volcanic eruptions could fill the stratosphere with sun-blocking material such as soot or sulphur dioxide. Island nations may have potential long-term survival value for humanity in such sun-blocking catastrophes. We aimed … Continue reading "A Historical Volcanic Winter & Future Sunlight-Blocking Catastrophes: New Study"

Matt Boyd, Ben Payne, Nick Wilson TLDR *Note: some readers report this hyperlink not working, the url is: https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/230215-nuclear-war-hazard-profile-nz-1.pdf Resilience: NZ’s Bread & Butter Global catastrophic risks such as nuclear war could result in long-term harm on a global scale, with profound disruption to our way of life in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). Other global … Continue reading "Workshop on Nuclear War/Winter & NZ: Wellbeing of millions and $1 trillion plus at risk, strategic resilience must become bread & butter NZ policy"

Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash TLDR: Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) include those events or incidents consequential enough to significantly harm or set back human civilization at the global scale (including: severe global pandemics, nuclear war, asteroid and comet impacts, supervolcanoes, sudden and severe changes to the climate, and intentional or accidental threats arising from the use and development of emerging

TLDR Overview The world still faces the risk of nuclear conflict and resulting severe cascading global impacts. A new paper from the McGuinness Institute provides a summary of the excellent work on the nuclear risk to NZ that was completed in the 1980s. This work found that the likely impact of a Northern Hemisphere nuclear … Continue reading "Nuclear War and NZ: Impact and Mitigation Approaches"

Matt Boyd & Ben Payne TLDR Introduction The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet proactively released two Cabinet papers describing a plan for improving how security risks of national significance are managed in New Zealand. These Cabinet papers address aspects of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attacks, the ongoing development of … Continue reading "Development of a National Security Strategy (plus NEMA) is one part of a National Risk Approach"

Matt Boyd, Nick Wilson, Ben Payne (12 min read) TLDR: The draft NZ National Security Long-term Insights Briefing (already informed by a public survey) is currently out for public consultation.

Seminar 21 Oct 2022 Ahead of our forthcoming Aotearoa New Zealand Catastrophe Resilience Project, I presented a seminar at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. You can listen to the audio of the seminar here (90 min total, question time with the CSER audience begins at 58:30). The slides associated with the presentation can be downloaded here.

This post introduces the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat), and outlines the aims, methods, and results of the project. You can read a range of project blogs here.