RiskScape

Filling a need for risk modelling

RiskScape allows many sectors, such as land-use planners, asset managers, emergency managers, and insurance providers, to better manage the significant risks posed by future natural hazard events.

RiskScape assesses impacts on people, buildings and infrastructure caused by any natural hazard, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides and tsunami. The insights RiskScape provides are key to designing mitigations, disaster management strategies and planning decisions.

The need for an easy-to-use forecasting tool suitable for a range of stakeholders led to the creation of RiskScape, a national research programme examining the impacts of hazards on society, especially in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Having a robust model is largely thanks to years of long-term investment in scientific research through the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Hazard and Risk Management Programme (Strategic Science and Investment Fund).

How RiskScape works

RiskScape can model the impacts of natural hazard scenarios to understand the variability and uncertainty of damage expected by a particular event. RiskScape supports open standards and users can use a range of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) formats, which gives users the flexibility to provide data specific to their hazard and location of interest.

To calculate risk, RiskScape requires the user to provide:

• geospatial data about the hazard (i.e. GIS layer)
• geospatial data about assets that stand to be damaged (e.g. people, buildings and infrastructure networks)
• consequence functions that estimate loss based on the characteristics of the hazard and assets.

The software uses that information to model potential damage outcomes for different scenarios. Outputs may include the probability of building damage, infrastructure damage, injuries to people, or fatalities.

Depending on the data used and the goals of the user, outputs can also include the probability of damage to crops, the projected cost of different hazard scenarios, and the knock-on effects of cascading hazards, such as initial damage caused by an earthquake and additional damage caused by a subsequent tsunami.

Results can be displayed in a range of intuitive maps, graphs and tables, making it easy for risk modellers to communicate their results to a wide range of stakeholders and decision-makers. 

What RiskScape software has been used for

Many GNS projects are already using RiskScape to inform project outputs, including the Cyclone Gabrielle landslide response, the Viet Nam Dam Safety project, Sliding Lands, DEVORA and ECLIPSE.

RiskScape has been used locally and internationally by a variety of stakeholders. Locally, RiskScape is increasingly being used by central and local government agencies and infrastructure operators.

For example, the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake and MBIE funded RiskScape to develop a customised risk modelling dashboard to support the response efforts to Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023.

The Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake are using RiskScape as a replacement for their loss modelling tool due to RiskScape’s ability to model a wide range of natural perils.

A New Zealand emergency management agency is using RiskScape for risk-informed decision making related to natural hazards and other response activities.