Our intentions: Reviewing Auckland Council's work on disaster preparedness and resilient communities

The Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009 requires the Auditor-General to periodically review the service performance of Auckland Council and each of its council-controlled organisations.

Auckland Council identified disaster resilience as a topic for us to examine in this year’s review. We agreed that an audit on this topic would be valuable, not only to Auckland Council but potentially to the rest of the country. The Treasury, in its New Zealand Infrastructure Plan for 2015, also identified that “there is a need to increase the sophistication of how we think about resilience, shifting beyond a narrow focus on shock events or infrastructure failure and thinking more about interdependencies, levels of service and community preparedness.”

During 2019/20, we will examine how effectively and efficiently Auckland Council is building its resilience and preparedness to respond to disasters, working in partnership with other agencies, local iwi, and communities to reduce disaster risks and prepare for disaster response.

Auckland remains largely untested in terms of responding to disasters in recent times, but it faces several different types of potential hazards, including tsunamis, flooding, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and earthquakes.

Although all members of a community are exposed to the risks associated with disasters at similar rates, vulnerability is not shared equally among the population. During a disaster, vulnerability is influenced by demographic (such as age and disability) and environmental (such as economic resource limitations and social networks) characteristics.

Our focus will be on the more vulnerable communities that may have less capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the effects of a disaster.

The contact person for this audit is the Sector Manager for Auckland, Sarah Markley.

Please use the feedback form on the right if you’d like to interview Sarah about this audit, make a suggestion, or ask a question.

We expect to complete this work before the end of 2019 or in early 2020.