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    • Issue #14 Impact assessment for infrastructure development >
      • Impact assessment for infrastructure development - an introduction
      • Place Matters: The importance of geographic assessment of areas of influence in understanding the social effects of large-scale transport investment in Wellington
      • Unplanned Consequences? New Zealand's experiment with urban (un)planning and infrastructure implications
      • Reflections on infrastructure, Town and Country planning and intimations of SIA in the late 1970s and early 1980s
      • SIA guidance for infrastructure and economic development projects
      • Scoping in impact assessments for infrastructure projects: Reflections on South African experiences
      • Impact Assessment for Pacific Island Infrastructure
    • Issue #13 Health impact assessment: practice issues >
      • Introduction to health impact assessment: practice issues
      • International Health Impact Assessment – a personal view
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      • An integrated approach to assessing health impacts
      • Assessing the health and social impacts of transport policies and projects
      • Whither HIA in New Zealand….or just wither?
    • Issue #12 Risk Assessment: Case Studies and Approaches >
      • Introduction
      • Risk Assessment and Impact Assessment : A perspective from Victoria, Australia
      • The New and Adaptive Paradigm Needed to Manage Rising Coastal Risks
      • Reflections on Using Risk Assessments in Understanding Climate Change Adaptation Needs in Te Taitokerau Northland
      • Values-Based Impact Assessment and Emergency Management
      • Certainty about Communicating Uncertainty: Assessment of Flood Loss and Damage
      • Improving Understanding of Rockfall Geohazard Risk in New Zealand
      • Normalised New Zealand Natural Disaster Insurance Losses: 1968-2019
      • Houston, We Have a Problem - Seamless Integration of Weather and Climate Forecast for Community Resilience
      • Innovating with Online Data to Understand Risk and Impact in a Data Poor Environment
    • Impact Connector #11 Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation, and Impact Assessment: views from the Pacific >
      • Introduction
      • Climate change adaptation and mitigation, impact assessment, and decision-making: a Pacific perspective
      • Climate adaptation and impact assessment in the Pacific: overview of SPREP-sponsored presentations
      • Land and Sea: Integrated Assessment of the Temaiku Land and Urban Development Project in Kiribati
      • Strategic Environmental Assessment: Rising to the SDG Challenge
      • Coastal Engineering for Climate Change Resilience in Eastern Tongatapu, Tonga
      • Climate-induced Migration in the Pacific: The Role of New Zealand
    • Impact Connector #10 Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation >
      • Introduction
      • Is a “just transition” possible for Māori?
      • Adapting to Climate Change on Scale: Addressing the Challenge and Understanding the Impacts of Asia Mega-Cities
      • How responding to climate change might affect health, for better or for worse
      • Kanuka, Kereru and carbon capture - Assessing the effects of a programme taking a fresh look at the hill and high country land resource
      • Wairoa: Community perceptions of increased afforestation
      • Te Kākahu Kahukura Ecological Restoration project: A story within a story
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      • Introduction to Impact Connector Issue 9 – Impact assessment and Covid 19
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      • Tourism – the long haul ahead
      • Making sense of the impact of Covid-19: planning, politics, and the public good
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      • Challenges for Social Impact Assessment in New Zealand: looking backwards and looking forwards
      • Insights from the eighties: early Social Impact Assessment reports on rural community dynamics
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      • Building resilience in Rural Communities – a focus on mobile population groups
      • Assessing the Impacts of a New Cycle Trail: A Fieldnote
      • The challenges of a new biodiversity strategy for social impact assessment (SIA)
      • “Say goodbye to traffic”? The role of SIA in establishing whether ‘air taxis’ are the logical next step in the evolution of transportation
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      • The future of Ecological Impact Assessment in New Zealand
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      • Introduction
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Introduction

Tom Burkitt, DHI Water & Environment
​
Rajan Ghosh, Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago 
​Firstly, we wish to acknowledge the efforts of the contributors to this special edition of the NZAIA Impact Connector. These are very demanding times for everyone and yet they’ve delivered a diverse and very engaging set of articles.
 
Thank you all.
 
With this edition of Impact Connector, we’re focusing on risk and impact assessment. Risk assessment and impact assessment are disciplines that have evolved in parallel and have an intriguing and overlapping relationship. Indeed, debate continues about whether they are, in fact, distinctly different or not.
 
We won’t resolve the debate here, and it’s not our intention to do so. We can and will, however, refer you an excellent early treatise by Andrews (1) on the subject and Martina Zelenakova’s paper (2) on the integration of risk assessment with the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process. From these you can explore the relationship between the disciplines.
 
This edition of Impact Connector serves as an introduction to risk assessment and offers new and innovative ways of understanding and responding to risk. It also describes case studies where a variety of methods were applied to understand the risk from natural hazards and climate change. We don’t explore public health risk or many other sub-domains of risk assessment and, intentionally, the focus has been on risks presented by natural hazards.
 
We begin with an engaging piece from Jack Krohn of the Victorian State Government in Australia that challenges our overuse of jargon and offers a perspective on the application of impact and risk assessment from Australia. This sets the scene well for our other papers.
 
We then hear from Rob Bell, who after many years leading a critically important research programme on natural hazards and risk with NIWA, provides justification for an adaptive approach to responding to uncertainty. Both risk assessment and impact assessment can incorporate this paradigm when specifying approaches to mitigate risk and impact over time.
 
Then Matt de Boer of the New Zealand Climate Commission, and formerly with Northland Regional Council (NRC), gives his perspective on how risk assessment helps inform an understanding of the impacts of climate change and how he and his former team at NRC approached climate risk assessment and adaptation planning in Northland Region of New Zealand.
 
Damon Coppola then writes about values-based impact assessment and emergency management, an approach where risks to what is valued by communities, including their vision of development, must be analysed and communicated clearly in order to engage communities effectively in addressing the potential impacts.
 
One of the toughest challenges in risk assessment is quantifying and communicating uncertainty. Bapon Fakhruddin and John Handmer of Tonkin & Taylor and RMIT University, respectively, give us an engaging example of how they’ve addressed this in the context of flood risk management.
 
John Kreft and Mark Easton have been establishing a very clever platform for monitoring rockfall risk for Waka Kotahi – The New Zealand National Transport Agency. It was the ambition of Waka Kotahi to have a near real-time impact-based forecasting system for rockfall risk along its state highway road corridors, and this paper describes how this was achieved.
 
Some of you will be familiar with how the insurance sectors assesses risk and seeks to understand the losses associated with likely future events. We’re fortunate to have Ryan Crompton & Paul Somerville of Risk Frontiers contribute an interesting paper on their work to ‘normalise’ the losses associated with historic natural hazards in New Zealand.
 
Bapon’s second contribution is with his colleague, Richard Reinan-Hamill, and they describe how they have achieved seamless forecasting of weather and climate impacts. This important work sets a precedent for future impact-based forecasting and early warning systems.
 
Finally, we offer a short story about how key data gaps were addressed in a comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment completed for the State Government of Uttarakhand in Northern India. This study is typical of projects invested in by the World Bank and other international development agencies as they invest in strengthening capacity for disaster risk reduction.
 
So, quite the variety. Enjoy!
 
Tom & Rajan
Download Introduction as a PDF

​References 


(1) Andrews, R.N.L (1990). “Environmental impact assessment and risk assessment: learning from each other” in Environmental Impact Assessment Theory and Practice (ed Wathern, P.), Routledge Press. 

​(2) Zelenakova, Martina (2017) Risk Analysis within Environmental Impact Assessment: A review. Proceedings of the 17th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference (SGEM2017)
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  • Home
    • Environmental Impact Assessment
    • Social Impact Assessment
    • Strategic Environmental Assessment
    • Community & Stakeholder Engagement
    • Management, Monitoring and Reporting
  • About Us
    • Core Group >
      • Core Group Meeting Minutes
    • Our Partners and Affiliates
    • AGMs
    • Ethics
  • Membership
    • Sign Up for NZAIA Membership
  • Conferences
    • Proceedings from Past Conferences >
      • 2022 - Wellbeing, Sustainability and Impact Assessment: towards more integrated policy-making
      • 2021 - Social Impact Assessment >
        • Posters
        • 2021 Students
      • 2019 - Climate Change >
        • Posters
        • 2019 Students
        • Conference Photos
        • Contact List
      • 2018 - Regional Development
      • 2016 - Strategic Environmental Assessment
      • 2015 - Where to for Impact Assessment?
      • 2014 - Transport Infrastructure
      • 2013 Fresh Water Management
      • 2012 - Mineral Extraction
  • Impact Connector
    • Issue #14 Impact assessment for infrastructure development >
      • Impact assessment for infrastructure development - an introduction
      • Place Matters: The importance of geographic assessment of areas of influence in understanding the social effects of large-scale transport investment in Wellington
      • Unplanned Consequences? New Zealand's experiment with urban (un)planning and infrastructure implications
      • Reflections on infrastructure, Town and Country planning and intimations of SIA in the late 1970s and early 1980s
      • SIA guidance for infrastructure and economic development projects
      • Scoping in impact assessments for infrastructure projects: Reflections on South African experiences
      • Impact Assessment for Pacific Island Infrastructure
    • Issue #13 Health impact assessment: practice issues >
      • Introduction to health impact assessment: practice issues
      • International Health Impact Assessment – a personal view
      • Use of Health Impact Assessment to develop climate change adaptation plans for health
      • An integrated approach to assessing health impacts
      • Assessing the health and social impacts of transport policies and projects
      • Whither HIA in New Zealand….or just wither?
    • Issue #12 Risk Assessment: Case Studies and Approaches >
      • Introduction
      • Risk Assessment and Impact Assessment : A perspective from Victoria, Australia
      • The New and Adaptive Paradigm Needed to Manage Rising Coastal Risks
      • Reflections on Using Risk Assessments in Understanding Climate Change Adaptation Needs in Te Taitokerau Northland
      • Values-Based Impact Assessment and Emergency Management
      • Certainty about Communicating Uncertainty: Assessment of Flood Loss and Damage
      • Improving Understanding of Rockfall Geohazard Risk in New Zealand
      • Normalised New Zealand Natural Disaster Insurance Losses: 1968-2019
      • Houston, We Have a Problem - Seamless Integration of Weather and Climate Forecast for Community Resilience
      • Innovating with Online Data to Understand Risk and Impact in a Data Poor Environment
    • Impact Connector #11 Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation, and Impact Assessment: views from the Pacific >
      • Introduction
      • Climate change adaptation and mitigation, impact assessment, and decision-making: a Pacific perspective
      • Climate adaptation and impact assessment in the Pacific: overview of SPREP-sponsored presentations
      • Land and Sea: Integrated Assessment of the Temaiku Land and Urban Development Project in Kiribati
      • Strategic Environmental Assessment: Rising to the SDG Challenge
      • Coastal Engineering for Climate Change Resilience in Eastern Tongatapu, Tonga
      • Climate-induced Migration in the Pacific: The Role of New Zealand
    • Impact Connector #10 Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation >
      • Introduction
      • Is a “just transition” possible for Māori?
      • Adapting to Climate Change on Scale: Addressing the Challenge and Understanding the Impacts of Asia Mega-Cities
      • How responding to climate change might affect health, for better or for worse
      • Kanuka, Kereru and carbon capture - Assessing the effects of a programme taking a fresh look at the hill and high country land resource
      • Wairoa: Community perceptions of increased afforestation
      • Te Kākahu Kahukura Ecological Restoration project: A story within a story
    • Issue #9 Impacts of Covid-19 >
      • Introduction to Impact Connector Issue 9 – Impact assessment and Covid 19
      • Covid-19 fast-track consenting: climate change legacy key to success
      • Tourism – the long haul ahead
      • Making sense of the impact of Covid-19: planning, politics, and the public good
    • Issue #8 Social Impact Assessment >
      • Challenges for Social Impact Assessment in New Zealand: looking backwards and looking forwards
      • Insights from the eighties: early Social Impact Assessment reports on rural community dynamics
      • Impact Assessment and the Capitals Framework: A Systems-based Approach to Understanding and Evaluating Wellbeing
      • Building resilience in Rural Communities – a focus on mobile population groups
      • Assessing the Impacts of a New Cycle Trail: A Fieldnote
      • The challenges of a new biodiversity strategy for social impact assessment (SIA)
      • “Say goodbye to traffic”? The role of SIA in establishing whether ‘air taxis’ are the logical next step in the evolution of transportation
    • Issue #7 Ecological Impact Assessment >
      • The future of Ecological Impact Assessment in New Zealand
      • Ecological impact assessment and roading projects
      • EcIA and the Resource Management Act
      • Professional Practice and implementation of EcIA
      • EcIA in the Marine Environment
    • Issue #6 Landscape Assessment >
      • Introduction
      • Lives and landscapes: who cares, what about, and does it matter?
      • Regional Landscape Inconsistency
      • Landscape management in the new world order
      • Landscape assessment and the Environment Court
      • Natural character assessments and provisions in a coastal environment
      • The Assessment and Management of Amenity
      • The rise of the THIMBY
      • Landscape - Is there a common understanding of the Common?
    • Issue #5 Cultural Impact Assessment >
      • Introduction
      • Potential of Cultural Impact Assessment
      • The Mitigation Dilemma
      • CIA and decision-making
      • Insights and observations on CIA
      • Achieving sustainability through CIA
      • CIA - Enhancing or diminishing mauri?
      • Strategic Indigenous Impact Assessment?
    • Issue #4 Marine Environment >
      • Introduction
      • Iwi, Impact Assessment and Marine Environment
      • Sea-Bed Mining Application in Taranaki
      • The wreck of the MV Rena
      • High Court RMA Controls on Fishing
      • Initiatives in the Pacific Islands
      • SEA in an NZ context
    • Issue #3 Strategic Environmental Assessment
    • Issue #2
    • Issue #1
  • Resources
    • Webinars
    • IAIA Resources
    • United Nations Guidance
    • Donors Guidelines and Principles
    • Oceania and the Pacific
    • Natural Systems >
      • Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services
      • Agriculture & Food Systems
      • Water Management
    • Social Impact Assessment
    • Health Impact Assessment >
      • Climate Change & Health
      • Air Quality Impact Assessment
    • Cumulative Impact Assessment
    • Community and Stakeholder Engagement
    • Indigenous Peoples
    • Climate Change and Disaster Risk Resilience >
      • Adaptation Planning
      • Nature-based Solutions
    • Urban Development
    • Sustainable Development Goals
    • Strategic Environmental Assessment
  • Community
    • Membership Directory
    • News
    • Policy Submissions >
      • Past Submissions
    • Courses