Summary/TLDR

The recently published Covid-19 Royal Commission’s lessons should be applied beyond pandemic preparation to address all potential global catastrophic risks (GCRs).

Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) needs comprehensive plans for scenarios worse than Covid-19, including those involving destruction rather than just disruption of critical systems.

Key priorities include:

• Developing robust national risk assessment methodology that includes global catastrophes.
• Building resilience against extended trade isolation.
• Strengthening core health security measures including investment in public health and border control capabilities.
• Creating threat-agnostic plans for protecting critical sectors (energy, transport, food, communications).

Anticipatory governance of GCRs requires:

• Public engagement throughout the planning process.
• Integration of ethical frameworks.
• Cost-effectiveness analyses across prevention and mitigation options.
• Explicit consideration of worst-case scenarios.

Action is needed now while global stability permits meaningful preparation, as future conditions may make building resilience more difficult.

Success requires maintaining public trust, government transparency, and strong coordination across all sectors of society.

Introduction

NZ’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid-19 Lessons Learned published its Phase I Report in November 2024. The Report acknowledges the successes of NZ’s Covid-19 approach, but also the harms and associated lessons. The Commission makes 39 recommendations to help mitigate future pandemics, and other risks to NZ.

The Report covers the all-of-government NZ response to Covid-19, including ‘lockdowns’, border restrictions, the health system response, economy and social impact, vaccination and mandatory measures.

It is a shame that it took a catastrophe for a suite of sensible recommendations to emerge. However, we agree with the authors that action should extend beyond mere pandemic preparation.

In this blog, we look beyond naturally occurring pandemics and applying a global catastrophic risk (GCR) lens, we discuss what the Inquiry Report means in the wider context of national risks.

The Report’s Findings

The Inquiry Report makes eight ‘big picture’ observations about the Covid-19 pandemic, which it presents as follows (p.65):

The Report then follows these observations with six important lessons for the future, which they summarise in the following graphic (p.67):

Global Catastrophic Risks

The Report is explicit that, “many findings and lessons can be usefully applied to other threats [than pandemics].” We leave readers to look at the Inquiry’s Summary Document for full details and a comprehensive list of recommendations for pandemic preparedness. What we wish to highlight are the findings and gaps relevant to a sensible approach to GCRs more generally.

Other threats on the scale of Covid-19, or greater, include more extreme pandemics, perhaps resulting from bioweapon use, or spread of bioengineered pathogens. Also, major global risks such as nuclear war, extreme climate change, volcanic eruptions causing ‘volcanic winter’, global cyberattacks, asteroid and comet impacts, solar storms, and great power conflict. RAND Corporation has detailed most of these risks for the US Government in a 2024 Report. The same thinking underpinning the Inquiry Report on Covid-19 lessons learned, should be applied to these risks as well in coordinated fashion.

Assessing and preparing now for these civilisation-threatening risks is important, because civilisation appears to be entering a period of downturn and fragmentation, as exhibited in a series of concerning megatrends, and as is typical of civilisation cycles across time. This means, however, that the ability to prepare for and mitigate these risks might become more difficult in the medium-term future.

The Report is clear that some of NZ’s Covid-19 successes were down to mere luck, singling out for example the continuation of essential trade (p.49). The importance of locally led initiatives was also critical (p.50). Both resilience to trade disruption and appropriately resourcing communities are important global risk mitigation measures.

The Inquiry Report recommends that future approaches to major catastrophes should make explicit use of ethical frameworks. We completely agree. In fact, we took steps to starting a national conversation on values frameworks and extreme risks with our 2018 paper ‘Existential Risks: New Zealand needs a method to agree on a value framework’. GCR research has become more nuanced since then, but the need for a public conversation to inform national risk strategy remains.

Health Security

It is clear in the Report that public health expertise and infrastructure played a huge role in NZ’s Covid-19 success. While ‘lockdowns’, although often effective, were very expensive and caused harm to many people.

We support the Commission’s calls for investment in public health. We also advocate cost-effectiveness analyses across the many prevention and mitigation options for GCRs. We suspect that some initiatives, such as investing strongly in public health systems and workforce, will turn out to be some of the most cost-effective investments government can make, when the iterated costs of future pandemics are accounted for.

Our own retrospective analyses of Covid-19 outcome data (still in progress and preliminary) suggests that non-island countries experienced a death rate from Covid-19 inverse to the level of development of their core health security measures. Developing capabilities and capacities like those in the Global Health Security Index will be important during pandemics if NZ chooses not to strictly control its borders.

That said, another recent analysis we’ve performed suggests that the longer time islands spent with strict border measures, the fewer Covid-19 deaths they suffered, without any associated adverse economic impact.

We emphasise the difference in the determinants of Covid-19 outcomes between islands and other jurisdictions and caution anyone making comparisons between island and non-island countries.

It is possible that some future pandemics are far worse than Covid-19. See this report by Madhav et al for an indication of how frequently more severe pandemics will strike. NZ’s preparation needs to account for the possibility of a long period of isolation as an island refuge. The cost-effectiveness analyses we advocate above need to account for these likelihoods and which impacts of severe pandemics that we could avert.

Critically, future pandemic plans need to thoroughly consider border closure thresholds, and decision rules for similar, less strict, and more strict border measures depending on the severity and characteristics of a pandemic.

Health security and border measures are important, but we also know that people’s trust in each other, and trust in government, as well as less government corruption, are all strongly associated with pandemic success. These national characteristics must be maintained and strengthened.

Anticipatory Governance

The Inquiry Report strongly recommends more and better coordinated anticipatory governance of pandemic threats. It also highlights the lack of mechanisms to anticipate and evolve response plans. Particularly problematic was a kind of all-eggs-in-one-basket assumption that vaccines would end the pandemic, without a Plan B for emerging from ‘lockdowns’ and other measures.

We agree, and underline that anticipatory governance of pandemics can’t really be separated from governance of all GCRs, given many of the common downstream impacts that GCRs would have on an island nation like NZ.

Planning for pandemics, and especially a pandemic with the characteristics of Covid-19 was undercooked in NZ. If this is true of possibly the largest threat in expectation that the country was known to face, then it is likely to be truer for other GCRs. We note that NZ has only just (Nov 2024) released its first ever plan for a space weather catastrophe. The country needs plans for other GCRs, and threat agnostic plans that mitigate harm to critical sectors such as energy, transport, food supply, and communications. We have outlined this case, and a suite of resilience options in our 2023 report, ‘Aotearoa NZ, Global Catastrophe, and Resilience Options: Overcoming Vulnerability to Nuclear War and other Extreme Risks.’

The Commission’s Report emphasises the importance of all of government readiness for a pandemic, along with the need for central oversight of integrated pandemic preparation and an effective national risk management system. We agree. Such as system needs to develop an improved national risk assessment methodology and include GCRs in their assessment (perhaps referring to the RAND Report in the US).

NZ also needs legislation underpinning and mandating these assessment and planning functions, not just legislation that enables responses. The Inquiry Report advocates a publicly facing National Risk Register, but we’d extend this call. The whole national risk assessment process needs public involvement throughout its development and analysis cycles. The use of citizen assemblies could simultaneously inform and identify concerns and could be a forum for putting options and trade-offs to the public.

We have previously described similar processes in our papers on ‘Assumptions, uncertainty, and catastrophic/existential risk assessments’ and ‘Anticipatory governance for preventing and mitigating catastrophic and existential risks’. Our 2023 Main Report includes a chapter detailing what such anticipatory governance of GCRs generally might look like in the NZ context.

The implementation of a government Chief Risk Officer is another path that could be considered. Chief Risk Officers and the ‘three lines of defence’ approach are common and effective in the private sector (including the airline industry that Prime Minister Luxon comes from). The three lines include frontline operational ownership of risk, risk oversight by a Chief Risk Officer, and independent oversight of the whole process.

Strategic Resilience

The Inquiry Report rightly underscores the importance of resilient and adaptive health, justice, education, social and economic systems during a pandemic.

As indicated above, many GCRs have common (and different from Covid-19) implications for distribution of harm across sectors. Furthermore, sectors are densely interconnected and dependent on key processes such as trade, transport, energy, communications, and food supply.

Any initiatives aimed at improving resilience to future pandemics should be integrated with a wider ranging risk assessment and a set of strategies to build resilience and redundancy across at least these key sectors. Particularly concerning for NZ is trade isolation.

Destruction not just Disruption

Although trade was able to continue during Covid-19, this cannot be guaranteed in the case of other GCRs such as nuclear war, extreme solar storm, and so on. So, we need plans for scenarios where there is destruction, not merely disruption of global trade infrastructure.

We cannot be caught preparing only for the last battle, not the next. NZ needs to develop its ability to withstand an extended period of trade isolation and develop the infrastructure and capability to trade independently with Australia, coordinating and cooperating on critical needs.

Development of such resilience infrastructure, providing a Plan B, no matter what the critical issue, be it catastrophic shipping collapse, electrical grid failure, food production collapse, communications blackout, liquid fuel shortage, requires a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.

It is this kind of protection, from large scale unpredictable harm, that governments are most suited to ensuring. The risks, resilience options, and trade-offs need to be explicitly put to the public and debated. This requires a sophisticated and detailed national risk assessment, detailing the kind of capitals (human, physical, natural, and financial) that might provide affordances and options in the face of future catastrophes.

Action for National Resilience is Needed Now

We reiterate what we stated above, the world appears to be entering a period of geopolitical, climate, and economic instability, which as it progresses will likely undermine the ability of nations to develop resilience. We should not delay investment in assessing and mitigating GCRs. The prudent move is to buy our ‘insurance’ now, before any crisis strikes. Now is not the time for cuts and austerity on critical science and protections.

The Inquiry Report states that we need to be able to deliver ‘business-as-usual’ activity (p.78) during a pandemic of extended duration. We contest that future catastrophes could be very much worse, and we need plans that focus on how to deliver basic needs such as food, energy, and minimal communications during extreme scenarios. ‘Business-as-usual’ could be a dream.

The Report evaluated, and found problematic, some of the mandatory measures during Covid-19. Future scenarios could require other kinds of far-reaching mandatory measures, such as fuel or food rationing. These considerations need to be surfaced ahead of time, and debated, with resilience options sought, so they don’t come as a surprise should other GCRs strike.

NZ will need the capacity and capability to deal with future global catastrophes, and the experience with Covid-19 showed that although we managed to muddle through with some success, this cannot be assumed for other risks, at other scales, and in future contexts.

Conclusion

The Royal Commission’s Inquiry into Covid-19 provides valuable insights not just for future pandemic preparation, but for NZ’s approach to global catastrophic risks more broadly. While NZ managed the Covid-19 pandemic relatively well, we cannot rely on luck or assume similar approaches will work for different types of catastrophes.

The time to act is now, while we still have the capacity and stability to make meaningful preparations. This means developing robust risk assessment frameworks, building redundancy into critical systems, and strengthening our ability to operate independently during extended trade disruptions. Most importantly, we need to move beyond planning for mere disruption to preparing for potential destruction of key global infrastructure and systems.

As we face an increasingly unstable global environment, NZ must take a comprehensive, forward-thinking approach to catastrophic risk management – one that ensures our resilience against the full spectrum of potential global catastrophes, not just pandemics.

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