Risk consultancy Global Risk Consulting (GRC) Group has released its 2023 New Zealand Country Risk Report, an all-hazards analysis charting a challenging past year and uncertainties ahead.
Auckland-based GRC Group has released its inaugural country risk report for New Zealand, and according to Managing Director Chris Kumeroa, it marks the first edition of what will be an annual publication.
“We’re excited to announce today’s release of the 2023 Global Risk Consulting (GRC) Group New Zealand Country Risk Report,” he said at the report’s launch. “This new report presents GRC Group’s thinking around what’s driving risks to New Zealanders and what hazard-scape our nation can expect to be exposed to.”
The report can be purchased online, and also available online is a free-of-charge excerpt of the first nine pages of the report, which covers its table of contents, foreword, and methodology sections.
The methodology section itself makes for engaging reading, featuring vignettes that illustrate GRC’s foresight analysis on the potential threat posed by foreign interference in 2025, and what climate change might look like in 2035.
“One of the elements of our methodology that we found to be particularly powerful is our unique Hazard Layer Model (HLM), which provides a framework through which we can see how often distant macro sources of risk, such as climate change, geostrategic competition, and COVID-19, can manifest harmfully across our communities,” said Kumeroa.
Following an overview of New Zealand’s economic, demographic, defence and political situation, the report progresses to an analytical deep-dive across seven hazard categories, including natural disasters, transnational organised crime, COVID and biological threats, foreign interference, infrastructure failure, cyber threats, and terrorism and extremism.
“To our knowledge, this 52-page report is the most comprehensive New Zealand risk report on the market,” commented the report’s lead analyst Jackson Calder.
“Heading into the uncertain waters of 2023, the report provides insights into the cascading effects of natural disasters on our communities and our infrastructure, the ground-level impacts of foreign interference in politics, the economy, and the disinformation space, the tactics and impacts of transnational organised crime groups, our vulnerability to biological threats, and more,” he said.
Futures visualised
“It has become almost cliché to mention the ‘uncertain times’ in which we are living,” stated Kumeroa. “Commentators and policy makers have become accustomed to talking about our current risk landscape as being ‘unprecedented’, ‘unchartered’ and characterised by ‘black swans’, ‘extreme events’, and ‘wicked problems’. And while there is an almost unanimous perception that we face greater risks that what may have been the case, for example, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, there is less understanding of what that means for our communities and the people who inhabit them.”
This lack of understanding is something the GRC team have an antidote for, going so far as to paint vivid illustrations of potential future risk scenarios for Aotearoa, describing in detail the world we may inhabit within our foreseeable futures:
In 2035, the effects of climate change are being felt acutely by New Zealanders. Between December and April each year the prices of fruit and vegetables rise sharply as regular storms and tropical cyclones decimate traditional agricultural land. The adoption of vertical farming technology is lagging behind other comparable countries due to the influence of powerful agricultural lobbying, but industry experts predict a mood change over the next twelve months.
And of the state of foreign interference in 2025, the GRC team suggest:
Fuelling of fringe anti-authority and conspiracy groups by overseas agents has expanded from disinformation to funding and equipment to carry out disruptive activities designed to consume police, media, and political resources. Members of these groups receive this indirectly through proxies and remain unaware that they are targets of foreign interference.
These may be rather dystopian pictures, but they nevertheless present as the result of a robust and multidisciplinary analysis of the swirling historical currents that characterise the uncertainties of the present.
If a major critique of pre-9/11 risk assessments was that their failure was due – in the words of Donald Rumsfeld – to a failure of imagination, then GRC’s approach is one that eschews traditional in-the-box thinking and that places the ability to imagine at its core.
“The report is unique because of its scope and how interdisciplinary it is,” Calder told Line of Defence Magazine. “A lot of expert analysis of New Zealand’s risk environment ends up being siloed but we have really strived to bring it together in one place and explore how the risk profiles are interconnected, then released it into the public domain to stimulate discussion.”
“We didn’t shy away from combining a range of methodologies to create a novel approach,” he said. “We leaned into the Hazard Layer Model, the ISO 31000, the concept of Macro Risk Drivers, and even futures modelling techniques like Horizon Scanning and Critical Uncertainties Matrixes.”
Although a broad range of subject-focused professionals will likely find the report worthwhile, Calder says that the report is particularly useful for companies and agencies with a broad, complex scope. “Sectors like insurance, healthcare, national security, criminal justice, and even construction will get immense value out of exploring the interconnectivity of risk profiles, especially the way in which they may converge in the future,” he said.
