Resilience to Nature's Challenges

We are building new knowledge and tools that underpin a broad-spectrum resilience in our unique rural, urban, coastal and M?ori communities to natural hazards, including earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, tsunami, weather, coastal and rural fire hazards. We have special emphasis on extreme-risk sites – where multiple hazards combine to threaten community sustainability.

Our mission

We will partner with multiple stakeholders to generate new co-created research solutions to inform “how” New Zealand builds a transformative pathway toward resilience to nature’s challenges.

Through an agile research and engagement team, priority-driven transdisciplinary co-creation laboratories, and high-quality, targeted underpinning research, we will tackle the “wicked” problems facing our rapidly changing cultural, economic, built and natural environments.

Our pathway

• Open, inclusive and good governance that inspires others to take up the Resilience to Nature’s Challenges strategy
• Sourcing the best capability to pursue our research goals
• Undertaking bold, transformative research that unlocks the innovation potential behind collaboration and transdisciplinary research, including m?tauranga M?ori
• Engaging in co-creation to develop enduring and meaningful partnerships with stakeholders, resulting in sustainable and fit-for-purpose research solutions

Our aspirations

• The Resilience to Nature’s Challenges National Science Challenge becomes a trusted provider of research and advice to Aotearoa, including M?ori
• The Challenge delivers internationally linked and leading research
• Our research interventions and outcomes contribute to New Zealand achieving a transformational change in its resilience to nature’s challenges, evident in economic, social, infrastructure and cultural outcomes
• We become an exemplar for the co-creation of science with New Zealanders, including M?ori, for the benefit of Aotearoa