Resilience Challenge gets the green light

It is the sixth of the government's National Science Challenges to be launched and involves a consortium of 90 researchers from six universities, three Crown Research Institutes, and four private research organisations.

The Challenge has a ten-year lifespan and has been allocated funding of $19.6 million for its first four years.

Challenge Interim Director, Shane Cronin, said the Challenge represented a new partnership approach to managing natural hazards and risks in New Zealand.

Eighteen months of planning had gone into the creation of the Challenge and the development of its initial four-year work programme, Dr Cronin said.

"The Challenge has forged new working relationships and a new level of maturity in setting overarching goals and researcher priorities that go beyond an individual entity or an individual area of science.

"It will extend beyond defensive and adaptive approaches and will make New Zealand a safer place to live and a more attractive, lower risk investment opportunity."

Dr Cronin said the Challenge would also give birth to the next generation of researchers in natural hazards and risk reduction, with at least 20 post-graduate students being mentored through their PhD degrees between now and 2019.

"This will not only build new science, but new capacity to deliver it into New Zealand’s future."

The Challenge represented an enlightened combination of the earth and physical sciences, engineering, social sciences, governance, economics and business and enterprise.

Its initial research focus involved specialist inputs from a large range of disciplines into four topic areas. This included working to improve the resilience of:

• New Zealand's rural sector and its underpinning economy
• New Zealand's rapidly growing urban areas, especially Auckland
• the specific cultural and economic resources and challenges faced by Maori
• areas facing extreme and sometimes unsustainable hazard threat, particularly along our coasts and rivers.

In this last area – known as the 'edge programme' - the Challenge would tackle big unknowns such as the compounding impacts of global climate change on New Zealand's natural hazard profile.

The Challenge is hosted by GNS Science in partnership with NIWA, Scion, The University of Auckland, Canterbury University, Otago University, Massey University, Lincoln University, Victoria University of Wellington, BRANZ, Opus International, Resilient Organisations Ltd, and Market Economics Ltd.