Emergency planning: New Zealand needs one plan for roads, rail, ports and air

Resumen detallado

Kali Mercer is WSP Fellow at the Helen Clark Foundation and Every year, around 6000 slips, floods, and tremors damage New Zealand’s state highways. For most of us, that’s an…

Hikuwai bridge on SH35, which runs along the East Cape north of Tolaga Bay, after Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023. Photo / Pete Sims

Every year, around 6000 slips, floods, and tremors damage New Zealand’s state highways.

For most of us, that’s an inconvenience. For regions such as Tairāwhiti, the West Coast and Northland that are heavily reliant on one key road, such events mean missed hospital appointments, lost income, and long detours. In the worst-case scenarios, it can mean complete isolation for days, or even weeks.

The regions matter to us all. They deliver fresh food to our supermarkets, and earn much of our export income – dairy, horticulture, forestry. But they depend on reliable roads, rail, ports and air links to reach their markets. The same networks connect communities to healthcare, education, work and family.

A new report by Helen Clark Foundation and WSP, Rethinking Regional Connectivity, starts from an uncomfortable truth: our networks are more vulnerable than we may think. New Zealand has a substantial economic engine in its regions, but weaknesses in the transport network leave that engine, and the country, exposed.

And the pressures are mounting. The country faces growing fiscal constraints on transport investment due to increasing costs and competing demands for investment in other types of infrastructure such as healthcare. Meanwhile, many regions are grappling with how to maintain transport networks to a high standard with a smaller rates base and proportionally more older residents on fixed incomes. That makes it all the more important that every dollar is spent as efficiently as possible.

Tairāwhiti is a good example of those vulnerabilities. The region is one of the most remote in New Zealand, sparsely populated, but with a sprawling road network to maintain. The region has young, unstable geology and no rail, leaving a primary production economy heavily dependent on slip-prone roads.

Recent weather events, including Cyclone Gabrielle…

Some…

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