The government is investing further millions in a National Flood Map that will aggregate council flood data and build national-scale modelling to fill gaps. This follows five years of publicly funded national flood modelling through NIWA: outputs that remain commercially restricted and explicitly not intended for higher-resolution property or planning decisions.

Clearly flood information is needed. NZ’s data is often fragmented, difficult to access, and highly variable in quality and coverage. A national platform has the potential to make hazard information more accessible, identify gaps in existing data, and support more consistent decision-making.

However, better information on its own, without a coherent framework around it, will not reduce flood risk. 

At present, New Zealand's National Adaptation Framework is much clearer on how risk information will be produced than on how adaptation decisions will be made. Recent experience with Canada's Flood Risk Finder illustrates what happens when that gap is left open: questions have emerged about data consistency, jurisdictional ownership, and how users should interpret information derived from different underlying models. The systems do not exist to translate the platform into risk reduction.

There are at least two ways a flood information platform can unintentionally increase risk rather than reduce it (known as maladaptation). It can shift development away from one hazard while increasing exposure to others. And it can place the greatest burden on those least able to respond. Avoiding these outcomes requires flood information systems to sit within a much broader adaptation and hazard management framework.   

Plan for multiple hazards

A flood-only viewer encourages decisions based on a partial picture of risk. Our research has shown that reducing coastal flood exposure can unintentionally increase exposure to hazards such as wildfire and landslide elsewhere. Directing development away from flood risk without accounting for what it moves toward is maladaptative.

A national platform should map multiple hazards and make their interactions visible. This is also where significant efficiency gains are possible. Councils currently commission hazard modelling independently, often producing overlapping work at varying quality. A national approach could prioritise high-risk areas, standardise outputs, identify where gaps remain, and reduce costs while establishing a funded programme to close those gaps over time.

Connect hazard data to decisions

The proposed flood viewer is currently framed primarily as an information platform. The National Adaptation Framework emphasises improving access to risk information so that households, councils and markets can make informed decisions. What remains unclear is how those decisions are intended to occur once that information becomes available.

Hazard information only changes behaviour when it is connected to the decisions that shape land use, asset planning, or emergency management. That means integration with council decision processes. For example, the information shown should be the basis for planning and consenting, including LIM reporting and the National Policy Statement on Natural Hazards, which now provides a national framework for defining high natural hazard risk. This creates an opportunity to more meaningfully shape land-use decisions and limit further development in high-risk areas.

Clarify what support exists for existing communities

The largest and most complex issue is what happens to people living and owning property in these high-risk areas. This is one that the National Adaptation Framework has not resolved. 

Equal access to information is not equal capacity to respond. People with financial means can respond to hazard information by relocating or retrofitting. Others cannot. In a constrained housing market, households already struggling with affordability or availability are unlikely to prioritise hazards that may not feel immediate.

Informing people of escalating risk without providing meaningful pathways for action can be disempowering, leading to fatalism, distrust and disengagement.

This raises a series of questions that the National Adaptation Framework currently leaves largely unresolved. What support exists for households already in increasingly exposed areas? How will this information interact with insurance withdrawal, mortgage lending and property values? What obligations will councils have once nationally consistent hazard information exists? How will that information align with their own hazard information? What mechanisms will prevent further development in areas already known to face escalating risk?

These are the questions that determine whether national hazard information actually reduces risk.

What an integrated system looks like

An integrated natural hazard management system needs to do more than make information accessible. It needs to create the conditions under which that information changes decisions and sustains itself without depending on ministerial direction to do so.

Resilience Explorer has been built based on this. Rather than focusing only on flood information, it integrates multiple hazards, existing reports, and local datasets into a single operational platform. Councils contribute their data not because they are directed to, but because doing so directly improves their own planning and operational capability. Asset managers, emergency planners, and land use teams are using it for day-to-day work. That is what a functional incentive structure looks like.

Our public Risk Stories combine hazard information with infrastructure, access, community and asset consequence, helping communities understand what hazards mean in practice: which services are disrupted, what choices follow, what the trade-offs are. Through REx | Property, hazard information is directly integrated into LIM reporting and the National Policy Statement on Natural Hazards, connecting information to the decisions that shape land use. 

Increasingly, what decision-makers and communities want to understand is not just where hazards exist, but what the implications and costs are both now and in the future. Resilience Explorer shows the “so what” of hazards in terms of infrastructure, social, and financial burden. This means decision makers can make decisions with evidence. 

Councils already hold substantial hazard information, often at higher resolution and with more local context than national products can provide. The challenge is often not producing more hazard information, but surfacing, integrating and operationalising what already exists. We have built a system around it that enables this information to become action. 

That is the standard to which we must hold the National Adaptation Framework and Flood Map. New Zealand does not have a shortage of flood hazard data, we are lacking the frameworks to turn that data into risk-informed action for the businesses and communities that need it.

Dr Tom Logan is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in Civil Systems Engineering at the University of Canterbury, and CTO of Urban Intelligence.