From Disaster Response to Anticipatory Governance: why Aotearoa New Zealand’s long-term resilience thinking must address global catastrophic risk and systemic vulnerabilities

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s 2025 draft briefing on long-term hazard resilience is commendable in emphasising anticipatory governance. However, it still exemplifies broader limitations in risk assessment focusing on familiar localnatural hazards while excluding global catastrophic risk. We examine how current risk reduction approaches remain trappedwithin frameworks addressing symptoms rather than systemic forces. Effective resilience requires expanding hazard scope to includeglobal hazards: large-scale (nuclear) conflict, large global volcanic eruptions, and bioengineered pandemics. Building resilience tothese and similar risks requires recognising cascade dynamics and implementing transparent approaches to generalised resilience toensure basic needs.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Policy Quarterly

• Publication date

  2025-11-09

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.26686/pq.v21i4.10337
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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