Resilience to Nature’s Challenges

Primary Investigator: Dr Caroline Orchiston.

Project Overview

Rural Priority Laboratory

The Rural Co-Creation Laboratory will broker innovative solutions for enhancing the resilience of rural New Zealand, recognising its unique contribution to our national identity and its pivotal economic function. A resilient rural backbone will be built via:
• Developing an integrated framework for assessing resilience to natural hazards across rural value chains: from households to regions and small to global-scale agribusinesses;
• Producing tools for resilience-interventions and defining opportunities, through comprehensive scenario activities with key sectors, communities and regions; and
• Building a researcher-stakeholder co-creation team and outreach network as 'honest brokers' for policy and practice leadership via new networks and through chains of land care, disaster management and other farming, tourism and rural community initiatives.
These outcomes will fast-track resilient solutions for multiple hazards into the New Zealand rural context.

Cultural Toolbox

The Cultural Toolbox research will investigate three priority research areas focused on understanding, harnessing and building social norms that underpin a resilient culture in New Zealand. Integral to this research will be an outcome-focused plan to clearly define the best tools and strategies to facilitate resilience becoming an integral “part of what we do and who we are”. Diverse research methods will include a co-creation approach to build trust and respect-based relationships with key stakeholders/users from the outset. We will investigate new and rapidly evolving technologies, and the ways these can be harnessed to develop social norms of resilience across diverse communities and hazard profiles. We will engage with citizens to build their desire for involvement in hazard-related science, and develop a framework for citizen-science initiatives.

Caroline is Co-lead of the Rural programme, with Prof. Tom Wilson (University of Canterbury). More information about the Rural programme and Resilience to Nature's Challenges can be found here: Resilience to Nature's Challenges