Budget has committed more than $1 billion for cyclone relief, resilience, and emergency preparedness. Photo: Uawa Live
The halting of an emergency database coordination project will not affect the government's ability to prepare for and respond to natural disasters, a minister says.
The Mateparae inquiry, the main review of the response to Cyclone Gabrielle, recommended that a system be built to share a common operating picture, so responders had a better overall grasp of threats and resources.
That recommendation had been made several times over the years.
Land Information New Zealand had, since 2021, been building a prototype system for sharing its emergency databases across police, Fire and Emergency, Civil Defence and other groups - but dropped it after reviewing its budget amid the public sector cuts ordered by the government.
The office of Minister for Land Information Chris Penk said the project was only ever a pilot and it was not LINZ's role to develop a common operating picture. Instead, that was something that Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell was looking at.
"The decision to not to progress the project does not affect the government's ability to better prepare for and respond to emergencies," it said in a statement.
"Minister Mitchell's work and any possible development of a common operating picture is separate to the work that LINZ was carrying out and is unaffected by LINZ's decision to discontinue development" on a common operating datasets for emergency management, or CODEM system, the statement said.
LINZ spent $50,000 over three years from baseline budgets to come up with a CODEM demonstrator.
Minister for Land Information Chris Penk. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Penk's office said this was to show how users could access geospatial datasets online from a single point. It did not have any emergency warning capability.
"It was never intended to go beyond this step unless dedicated funding was secured," the statement said.
"The CODEM project wasn't mandated by government and the decision to discontinue it was an operational decision by LINZ."
Budget changes did not affect LINZ's core function of providing geospatial information to support emergency responses, the statement said.
LINZ has provided such information in 10 storms since 2020, including Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary Day floods, its records show.
Despite this, a core finding of the Mateparae inquiry, and others into the lethal storms last year, was that coordinated information - and thus, coordinated action - was lacking.
"The inquiry heard that a lack of situational awareness and timely, complete, and consistent information contributed to problems with the immediate management of the response in some areas, exacerbated by the lack of a common operating platform," it said in April 2024.
Though LINZ is the country's leading geospatial public agency, the 164-page Mateparae report did not mention it at all, and 'LINZ' did not appear in the report's long list of acronyms.
LINZ told RNZ that the pandemic spurred on its CODEM project.
"There was willingness across key emergency response agencies for improved and coordinated geospatial information, systems and capability across government during an emergency event," it said.
"In 2021, LINZ led discussions with (the National Emergency Management Agency) and geospatial specialists from emergency response agencies on their common operating picture requirements."
NEMA, the National Emergency Management Agency, has had few geospatial resources of its own up to this point.
Penk's office said the government took emergency management very seriously and the Budget had committed more than $1 billion for cyclone relief, resilience, and emergency preparedness.