It’s no good handing out blank cheques

Opinion: I concluded last week’s column with the statement that none of the reviews that have been undertaken in relation to the severe weather events that hit the North Island last year even begin to address recovery. Every one of the myriad reviews has focused on response, and that is because formal government reviews almost never focus on recovery. I cannot fathom why that is the case, given that the lessons we could learn from those experiences are vital for how we prepare for the future.
It is still hard to believe all these years after the Canterbury earthquake sequence, there has not been an overarching review of the recovery, which is still ongoing. We had bespoke government agencies established to run the city’s recovery and redesign the central city. Surely there are lessons to be learned from the approach that was adopted. Not all of them would we want to repeat.
Even the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team model, which I am a fan of, which rebuilt much of the city’s pipes and roads, has elements we would want to learn from. I add this to serve as a reminder that this work is part of the recovery process. It is only the urgent restoration work that is covered by the response. The longer-term recovery decisions raise questions about how these works are prioritised and, more significantly, how they are to be funded. I wouldn’t want anyone having to face a $400m hole in their council budget disguised as ‘savings to be found’ as was the case in 2013. 
Today I want to make the case for integrating the 4 Rs – readiness, response, recovery, and (risk) reduction.
In the Mateparae inquiry into last year’s events, one of the recommendations is that responsibility for leadership and coordination of critical infrastructure remains with the National Emergency Management Agency for readiness and response only, not reduction and recovery.
This may have been because the latter two were specifically excluded from the inquiry’s terms of reference, although even they could not completely ignore them. As was said they are part of an integrated approach to emergency management, and improvements in one area can lift performance in other parts.  
When I looked at the terms of reference, recovery was out of scope because of the timeframe it will take to recover. Will it be reviewed? Experience tells me not. The Government must seize the opportunity to remedy this.
Risk reduction and resilience building were out of scope as they were said to be covered by separate work programmes already underway, including resource management reforms, climate adaptation reforms, Future for Local Government, Cyclone Recovery Taskforce, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s work on strengthening the resilience of New Zealand’s critical infrastructure system.
The Government has put paid to some of these areas of work and is reworking others, but the list indicates the complexity of the issues we are faced with as a nation. We need to be bringing these issues together not creating more siloes.
Given there is a dearth of recovery and risk reduction post-event reviews, we need to look at the international literature, which invariably focuses on the centrality of community-led recovery. This does not mean handing blank cheques to communities. It means engaging them deeply in the process – it is their recovery after all. And where are those relationships held? Locally of course.
That’s why I am worried the inquiry has recommended that leadership for reduction and recovery be referred to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (the Hazard Risk Board) to consider which agency should hold functional leadership responsibility.
Who has been engaged in this conversation given these issues were outside the scope of the inquiry? Local government is central to this discussion, and to be blunt if we are going to be ready for whatever the future holds seismically and climate-wise, how on earth can we ignore the relationship between the work they do in the risk-reduction space and the impact risk reduction can have on both the response to and recovery from a particular event?
I have previously questioned whether there should be a dedicated but dynamic team with recovery expertise within Nema specifically tasked with working between local government (which sits alongside a locally led recovery) and central government. Risk and resilience should not just be buzzwords.
And a similar question can be asked about the oversight of risk reduction.
The review I thought added real value to our understanding in this space was the Report of the Hawkes Bay Independent Flood Review commissioned last year by Hawkes Bay Regional Council.
As I said then, this report was focused on the regional council’s flood protection and monitoring systems that were in place before the severe weather events and considered how they performed. The report looked at the history of the affected areas, including pre-European settlement, and the impact of the practices brought by the settlers as they sought to suppress the flood risks that exist in a large natural floodplain.
This is vital stuff and, as I asked, who is paying attention to this? Land-use planning is integrally linked to risk reduction measures, something we know only too well in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
But who has oversight of the risk reduction measures now? Every three years every one of the 78 territorial authorities completes a 30-year infrastructure strategy as part of the Long-Term Plan process. Does anyone look at these from a risk-reduction perspective? That may be a very good place to start. And perhaps that should also be a Nema function so we get a picture of what risk we might be exposed to should an adverse event hit more than one region again.
Which leads me back to a question I continue to ask. Why can’t we have a joined-up approach to conducting these reviews, when it was siloed thinking that has ignored the lessons of our history and as a result contributed to the problems we continue to face today?
The 4Rs are interconnected. They sit within a resilience circle that invites us to frame risk-reduction as an investment in response and recovery, and to place a risk-reduction lens over recovery plans, both before and after the worst happens.