The former chief science adviser to the prime minister wants a publicly-available version produced of a classified register of the risks thought to be facing New Zealand.
Sir Peter Gluckman has co-authored a report, which said the register was drawn up after it was realised few entities in New Zealand understood the implications when a space weather superstorm with potentially devastating impacts was detected in 2012.
That event missed the Earth, but it led to a panel being set up in 2014 by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) to consider how to enhance risk assessment.
The panel recommended the development of a national risk register that would include both civil and security risks.
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The enormous multi-year effort that followed produced more than 40 separate risk profiles, including some not previously on the agenda, the report, written by Gluckman and Dr Anne Bardsley from Koi T: The Centre For Informed Futures, said.
Massive releases of material from the Sun, referred to as a space weather event, can disrupt critical infrastructure.
There had been a debate, primarily in the political arena, about whether such a risk register should be public or confidential.
A decision by successive administrations to not release the public version of the risk register, even after it was finalised in 2018, demonstrated how the political process was biased away from placing high-impact but uncertain risks prominently on the agenda, the report said.
Gluckman and Bardsley acknowledged some aspects and details of a confidential version of a risk register may be security-sensitive, but said risk identification should be largely an open process.
Potential risks must be known to those who may be affected, so they could act to reduce their vulnerability and exposure to the risk, or prepare for possible consequences.
A public report on key findings of the register was critical, the report said. It gave many reasons to support that statement, including that feedback from the broader audience that had access to a public report would improve future versions of the register.
DPMC said the classified risk register was maintained by the National Security Group within the department. The risks identified are considered the most significant threats and hazards New Zealand faces and are regularly reviewed by the agencies responsible for the risk, to reflect the changing risk landscape.
DPMC agreed there had been consideration of releasing a national risk report based on the classified risk register, but that didnt go ahead.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration animation illustrates what happens when a major tsunami hits.
We are committed to ensuring the public discussion about risks and threats, it added.
The report from Gluckman and Bardsley suggested creating an independent national risk office in the Office of the Auditor General which reported to Parliament and not the Executive – to oversee and maintain a publicly available risk register and provide oversight of agencies general approach to risk management.
The report looked at the challenge posed by high-impact, inevitable but rare events (HIREs), such as a major tsunami, major viral pandemic, or a major space weather event.
Space weather, caused by massive releases of material from the Sun, came in for particular attention, with the report saying such events could disrupt critical infrastructure components both in space and on the ground, including satellites, GPS systems, and electrical transmissions grids.
Such events happened with some frequency, including incidents in 1989 and 2003 that did have an impact on the Earth.
But those events paled in comparison with the Carrington event of 1859, which could cripple electrical and digital communications infrastructure around the globe if it were to happen now, the report said.
Predicted contemporary impacts of a Carrington-level event include power outages to 2040 million people in the US for durations from 16 days to one to two years, with a cost estimate in the trillions of dollars.
The report says New Zealand was relatively unprepared for pandemic human disease.
Major and potentially lasting disruptions of space-based and earth-based critical infrastructures for communication and transportation (navigation and traffic control) and cascading impacts on other sectors are also to be expected.
The likelihood of such an event was estimated to be between 6 and 12 per cent in the next 10 years. The 2012 event that missed the Earth was larger than the 1859 Carrington event.
The report also looked at Covid-19, which it said was a rare event in terms of extreme impact, but one that was in many respects very predictable.
Like many other countries, the New Zealand Government found itself relatively unprepared for pandemic human disease, despite epidemiologists predicting for years the inevitability of a human viral pandemic of at least the scale of the current coronavirus crisis, the report said.
We can ask why our pandemic planning was not adequate to handle the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis, when we lacked sufficient stocks of personal protective equipment and struggled to ramp up testing capacity and contact tracing.
A flower memorial wall for the victims and their families following the March 2019 shootings at the Al Noor mosque and the Linwood mosque in Christchurch.
Before Covid-19, New Zealand had a pandemic management plan, but it was based on assuming the most likely event would be pandemic influenza, which had characteristics sufficiently different from the novel coronavirus that New Zealand, like most other countries, found itself inadequately prepared.
Similarly, while the New Zealand Security and Intelligence Service was well aware of the risk of terrorism, it focused its mitigation efforts on threats of Islamic radicalism. It did not sufficiently consider the risk of white nationalism that drove the March 15, 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack, the report said.
According to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack, that was partly due to a lack of capacity in the system. But there was also a failure of cross sector communication and engagement between public sector agencies involved in counter-terrorism efforts and anticipatory planning.
Before the attack the terrorist threat-scape in New Zealand was considered relatively benign, and was not high on the list of national security and intelligence priorities. There was also limited social licence for intelligence and security activities in this area.
The report also referred to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake that killed 185 people.
Police and emergency workers sift through the rubble of the CTV building, in Christchurch in February 2011.
Before the earthquake the potential for significant areas of eastern Christchurch soils to liquify upon ground shaking was already well identified, and was the subject of a report to authorities, the report said.
This, and the history of multiple episodes of steeple damage to the iconic Anglican Cathedral in the 150 years since it was first built, surely should have pointed out that Christchurch was earthquake-prone.
But this had not stopped planning consents for large-scale housing development in the pre-identified region that ultimately did liquify in response to a rather moderate earthquake.
As well as events triggered by natural and biological hazards, other kinds of HIREs would at some stage almost certainly happen, the report said.
An example was a large-scale industrial failure with cascading impacts across sectors.
Auckland was plunged into a five-week electricity crisis in the summer of 1998
Such an event occurred in Auckland in 1998, when the gas-filled underground power lines, installed 40 years prior and past their replacement date, failed, plunging the city into a five-week electrical power crisis that caused enormous socioeconomic disruption.
Frequent delays in making investment infrastructure decisions highlighted a bias against taking a precautionary approach, the report said.
It pointed to the Auckland Harbour Bridge and the September 2020 incident when a truck hit a support structure causing the closure of the four central bridge lanes for several days, throwing commuter traffic into chaos.
The event showed Aucklands economy was hostage to a single harbour crossing with minimal backup or alternative access to the central business district.
Indeed, it is now becoming clear that the ageing bridge infrastructure will soon lead to restrictions on its use, the report said.
Yet planning for the foreseeable need for a second harbour crossing remains conceptual and politically contested, rather than proceeding to an active action plan.
A damaged strut on the Auckland Harbour Bridge after it was hit by a truck in September 2020.
Similarly, when a digger broke the fuel pipeline from the Marsden Pt refinery to Auckland in 2017, the lack of redundancy of supply lines for delivering fuel to Auckland, and especially to the airport, came as a surprise to many, not least in government, the report said.
There had been a loss of institutional memory and no investment to maintain the preceding mechanism involving unloading fuel at the Auckland wharf, which could serve as a back-up and ensure the supply chain’s resilience.
When an ebola epidemic in West Africa threatened to spread to major transport hubs and impact on global travel and trade, it was surprising how little work New Zealand had done to ensure resilience of supply lines in the event of disruption of both shipping and air travel, the report said.
It is not clear that the lessons from the small amount of work done then have been fully incorporated into subsequent pandemic planning.
The report did not consider all theoretical risks, avoiding events seen as so improbable or impossible to prepare for that no preparation was undertaken. Such events included a large meteor strike, a reversal of the earths magnetic field, or a massive super-volcanic eruption from the central volcanic plateau.
