New Zealand is one of the most hazard-exposed countries on the planet, with our critical infrastructure system facing a unique set of complex geographic risks.
Our current infrastructure needs to be well placed to face these longstanding challenges, or and the increasing and new challenges of the 21st century such as:
- climate change, which can exacerbate the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.
- a deteriorating geopolitical environment, which is heightening threats to our national security.
- economic fragmentation, which is making it harder and more expensive to secure critical goods and services.
- technological change, which while enhancing efficiency is also creating new vulnerabilities – including to cyber attacks.
To address these challenges, the Government has committed to a programme of work to enhance the resilience of New Zealand’s critical infrastructure system against all hazards and threats.
This work will help the Government to deliver on recommendations in the New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy, commitments in the National Adaptation Plan and objectives of the National Security Strategy.
What is critical infrastructure?
Critical infrastructure is not yet defined, but is expected to include entities that provide essential services, including: energy (generation and distribution), telecommunications, water services (for fresh, waste and storm water), financial services, digital services (such as data storage), transport and health.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the capacity of a critical infrastructure entity to absorb a shock, recover from the disruption, adapt to changing conditions, and retain essentially the same level of essential service as before, even if that means delivering a function in a new or different way.
Government’s role
New Zealand needs to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach to regulating critical infrastructure resilience.
While some aspects of New Zealand’s critical infrastructure are regulated on a sector-by-sector basis, this doesn’t account for the significant dependencies and interdependencies between critical infrastructure entities. This means that outages in one sector can quickly disrupt service provision in other sectors – irrespective of how much they may have invested in their own resilience.
Public consultation undertaken in 2023 showed strong support for government to do more to enhance the resilience of our critical infrastructure.
DPMC is working with relevant agencies across different sectors to develop a new regulatory regime that enables:
- enforceable resilience requirements to be set evenly across all critical infrastructure, to reduce the risk of outages and mitigate their cascading impact across sectors.
- improved information sharing and gathering on hazards, threats, and vulnerabilities, to enable critical infrastructure entities to make well-informed investment decisions.
- last resort, step-in powers to be exercised by Government to support critical infrastructure entities in managing significant national security risks.
Have your say
The first public consultation on this work took place in mid-2023 and focused on the limits of New Zealand’s current regulatory approach to critical infrastructure and the need for reform. You can find the discussion document and submissions we received here: Critical Infrastructure Phase 1 Consultation - Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet - Citizen Space (dpmc.govt.nz)
This initial consultation has informed a series of policy proposals which will undergo further public consultation soon. The outcomes of this work and consultation will then be presented to Government to take decisions on the future regulatory approach to critical infrastructure resilience.