Disaster Risk Reducation Education

This month I travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time, where I visited several sites around Napier that were impacted by the massive floods that accompanied 2023’s Cyclone Gabrielle.

My colleagues and I had the privilege of meeting Māori representatives – the Indigenous people of New Zealand – and local government councils that were involved in post disaster recovery. Like many Indigenous Peoples worldwide, Māori communities are especially vulnerable to increasingly frequent floods, droughts and cyclones. But they also bring insights, capabilities, and a unique temporal perspective in which the ancestors, the present generation, and generations yet to come exist all at once – a perspective that can help guide practical approaches to disaster risk reduction.

International frameworks recognize the need for inclusion of Indigenous Peoples. But what does this look like in practice? My field visits in New Zealand – especially time spent with Māori near their rivers, community infrastructure, and homesteads – opened a new world for me, providing tangible examples of how Indigenous viewpoints, knowledge and experience can be woven into policies and practices. I will be thinking about these issues for a long time.

Gentle Reader,

I cannot claim to have gained unique and deep insights from a short visit. But please allow me to share a few initial reflections:

History still matters

Colonial legacies continue to shape today’s realities. New Zealand’s 1840 founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was intended to establish a partnership between Māori and the British Crown. Instead, different interpretations and breaches of the treaty have caused longstanding conflict, especially over land. Today there are formal processes to address land disputes, but still tensions remain on how to best manage disaster risk, including potential relocation on Māori land – much of which lies in hazard-prone areas increasingly exposed to the impacts of climate change.

What is notable is that disaster recovery in New Zealand involves Māori, local government and the Crown in a deliberative and consultative process. While many issues remain unresolved, this process helps nurture trust, builds on Māori repository of knowledge – which often incorporates reliable, detailed records of hazards and how to avoid them – and articulates community priorities.

Beyond physical resilience

Our first stop was in Tangoio, to visit a marae – an important communal and sacred space that is closely bound to the culture and identity of Māori. With a large sloping roof structure with traditional motifs and open ground, it serves as the locale both for community ceremonies and rituals, and, in times of distress such as disasters, as a space of refuge and comfort. It is not only a physical space, but also a focal point of collective memory and consciousness.

During the 2023 floods, the Tangoio Marae was badly damaged, and now needs to be relocated away from the growing risk of future floods. Māori respectfully describe the process of closure as being “put to sleep”: the process of relocation is more than just a physical challenge, but also a psychosocial and cultural one.

Hinewai Ormsby, Chair of the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, was one of the many local leaders who shared their wisdom and experiences with me during my visit. She explained that “in te ao Māori (the Māori world view), resilience is not just about engineering solutions; it is about honouring whakapapa (genealogy, connections), caring for the whenua (land) and waterways that sustain us, and ensuring that decisions are made collectively, with aroha (love, compassion) and accountability.”

A broader understanding of community

A community is not just a group of families: it's a web of relationships, including extended families, ancestors, and those yet to be born.

Conventional state interventions to support disaster risk reduction or post-disaster recovery usually focus on households as the base unit around which interventions are designed and implemented. This is a poor fit for Indigenous communities such as Māori, as communities are formed around the strong and complex connections, involving mutual support and interdependencies.

Meaningful interventions need to consider the entire community – in the context of its physical location – as a single, integrated unit with whom the support needs to be designed and co-created.

Tangata Whenua – the people of the land

Tangata Whenua – the people of the land –have Indigenous systems for managing resources, particularly land and water. These do not always fit well with “modern” systems. In 2017, New Zealand became the world’s first nation to grant a river, the Whanganui River, legal personhood in line with Maori custom.

Because land and water resource management is a key driver of disaster risk, evolving risks often require changes to land management – through relocation, through land-use changes, through physical protection measures like flood embankments – sometimes necessitating land ownership changes or state acquisition. This becomes especially complex when people do not exactly “own” land – as with Indigenous communities such as Māori, who are custodians of land which may have overlapping uses by different people.

Any risk reduction effort must explore innovative ways to take this complexity into account; for example, a community may grant local government easement rights to use some of their land for building flood embankments or for holding excess water.

Co-creating solutions

Effective, inclusive disaster risk reduction with Indigenous people is always a unique jigsaw puzzle – bringing together communities and their organizations, local and regional government, central government and private enterprise.

Around Napier, many of the disaster risk reduction solutions – whether by relocation or by structural mitigation actions – have often been co-designed through collaborative and consultative processes involving a wide variety of stakeholders. There is no standard template here, as each situation demands a unique solution.

Slow is fast – and the process is the product!

Time spent deliberating, discussing, consulting and co-creating is time well invested. Decisions that are taken collaboratively and thoughtfully deliver better risk reduction outcomes – both in physical terms and in terms of long-term improved awareness and shared understanding among the communities.

In Napier, a bridge lost to the floods is deliberately not being rebuilt in a hurry in the same location and with the same vulnerabilities. A temporary bridge (“rent a bridge”) has been put in place to restore connectivity; this allows time for the communities, and the local and regional governments to explore options for a new location and design – taking into account the risk of extreme events but also everyday convenience, and practical concerns such as availability of land.

Building on wisdom and knowledge

Indigenous wisdom needs to be recognized and complemented with modern science. Many of the marae have already withstood multiple hazardous events: the ancestors built them in locations chosen both for convenience and for safety and resilience.

However, we must recognize that Indigenous knowledge is collective, not individual. It is not static or uni-dimensional, and does not lend itself to neat “codification”.

Reductionist approaches to documenting this knowledge have limited value. We must find a way of tapping Indigenous knowledges and complementing them with modern science to serve our current needs. This requires dynamic conversations with those who hold such knowledge, and fostering environments in which they are empowered to apply highly localized understandings.

Aotearoa New Zealand offers us an example of development, disaster risk reduction, and post-disaster recovery that respects and consults Indigenous communities, providing the space for them to exercise their agency and chart their path towards a resilient future. While there are still unresolved challenges, it is encouraging they are walking together on this journey.

There is much for the world to learn from New Zealand’s approach.