Emergency management - weather event costs.
We have decided to a partial release of the information requested; - please see our answers below.
Request:
I am writing to request the following official information under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 (LGOIMA):
- Costs of recovery, in as much detail as available, from weather related natural disasters over the past 20 years – inclusive 2006 to 2025.
- Please provide detail of any funds provided by Government so I can avoid double counting (I’m doing the same for Central Government).
- Costs of resilience building work you have carried out over the past 20 years – inclusive 2006 to 2025.
- Any supporting information such as briefings on these events or reports on these events.
To provide context, I am doing a PhD on the costs of weather related natural disasters over the past 20 years in New Zealand Aotearoa, including the costs of resilience building, and the benefits of resilience building.
I understand the constraints on local government spending after working in a Council myself on climate resilience, and any commentary will include the need to support Councils who are in the frontline of climate change.
I have included a list of events listed by Insurance Council New Zealand as natural disasters as a guide - view guide here.
I’m aware that it misses a number of events so please feel free to include other events in your response.
If you need any clarification, please contact me as soon as possible via email.
Refined Request – 18 June:
Refinement of: Official Information Request – Actual spending on recovery and resilience regarding weather related natural disasters
Dear Mackenzie District Council,
Following discussions with a number of Councils, I’m providing some information which may help with refining this request. Can I suggest a search on detailed accounts for each year. Sadly Annual Report data usually isn’t detailed enough to find specific spending.
I am searching for the same information in Budget data documents which are publicly available, by using AI to search through each vote or sector for each year. If you’re not using it already this could be a good time to give it a go.
For the linked government accounts I have uploaded the pdf for the Economic Development and Infrastructure Sector to the Google AI search (or a more sophisticated one if you use one) and ask it to:
Create a table of spending on these areas: Disaster, emergency, recovery, response, restoration, danger, flood, tornado, fire, storm, severe weather, wind, damage, erosion, landslide, slip, storm surge.
And it provided me a useful response, including page references I can use to check data. See the table on the next page for an example result.
Another option to refine is to focus on the year when you had events in your area, either from the ICNZ list, or other events you know of, and see what you can find.
Finally, you could provide me with your detailed annual accounts, which would be used solely for this purpose, to search through myself, however, you may prefer not to do that understandably.
As you know, I am doing a PhD on the costs of weather-related natural disasters over the past 20 years in New Zealand Aotearoa, including the costs of resilience building, and the benefits of resilience building. As a former Council Principal Advisor Climate Resilience I found that we needed to demonstrate the trade-offs between cost of recovery and cost of adaptation to prevent damage in order to convince Council to spend on adaptation, versus spending on other important work. I’m hoping that concrete data will help Councils decide to do this work to reduce human and financial harm to communities. It may also be a reminder to ensure reports on weather disasters are written up at the time so we can all learn from the results.
AI search result
Thank you for your service to the public - I used to work in a government relations team and understand your concerns about staff time. I would be most grateful if you gave it a go and just give me what you can in the time you have.
Response:
We have decided to release the information you have requested; - please find attached response information supplied by the finance manager.