Help make our critical infrastructure more resilient

The Government is consulting on some regulatory changes to help make our critical infrastructure more resilient. We encourage you to have your say on how best to strengthen resilience in our critical infrastructure system.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s critical infrastructure faces many natural challenges and hazards. Our population and connecting infrastructure are geographically spread out, our land is tectonically active, which puts us at high risk of earthquake, volcanic activity and tsunami, and parts of the country are prone to severe weather events, which are expected to become more extreme with climate change. All these things contribute to Lloyds of London assessing us as the second highest disaster-loss risk in the world.­­

For many years, infrastructure owners have built and maintained their assets to withstand some sorts of high impact, inevitable, yet (usually) rare events. However, as recent storms have highlighted, many of our critical infrastructure networks have become increasingly dependent on one another – meaning that if one fails, others may experience outages or failures as well.

Such interdependencies have grown as infrastructure gets more digitally dependent and our economy and supply chains more globalised. Alongside this, we’ve seen a growing need to make infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change and to an increasingly complex geopolitical and national security environment (including risks of cyber-attack). Our hazard and resilience landscape has changed from what it used to be.

As a result, the Government is looking to change how we manage critical infrastructures – to move to a systems-based, regulatory framework that will ensure we are better able to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and recover from large-scale shocks. The changes are based on recommendations in both Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy and in Urutau, ka taurikura: Kia tū pakari a Aotearoa i ngā huringa āhuarangi: Adapt and thrive: Building a climate-resilient New Zealand – New Zealand's first national adaptation plan.

Increasing the resilience of New Zealanders’ infrastructure must be balanced against the cost of doing this, and against other mitigating factors, like efficiency and equitable access. The Government wants to get this balance right. This public consultation on the need to amend regulatory settings for critical infrastructure resilience means we can meet community expectations and futureproof our infrastructure system. These proposed changes include whether:

• we need a more systems-based approach to infrastructure;
• government should set clear and robust minimum resilience standards that are enforceable;
• government should have powers to manage national security risks in our critical infrastructure system;
• we need a central, coordinating agency responsible for setting policy and regulatory requirements for resilience for the critical infrastructure system.

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is running this consultation, which includes short engagement sessions in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, as well as online.