Transitioning Taranaki to a Volcanic Future
Taranaki is the most likely New Zealand volcano to cause national-scale impacts over our lifetimes. Positioned upwind from our most populous regions of Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty, all Taranaki eruptions will disrupt air and surface transport, tourism, farming, power and water supplies. This volcano has a 50% probability of erupting over the next 50 years. Yet the dormancy since Taranaki’s last eruption (~AD1790) is one of its longest. Thus, we have no modern experience of its typically very long eruptions. Past research shows that once Mt. Taranaki starts erupting, it continues for years, decades, or centuries. A recent estimate of the net losses in economic activity from a brief Mt. Taranaki eruption (considering only a subset of potential impacts) is crudely estimated at ~NZ$1.7-4.0 billion of GDP per year, or ~NZ$13-26 billion, for a decade of volcanism.
As part of the ‘Transitioning Taranaki to a Volcanic Future’ project led by Dr. Shane Cronin (University of Auckland) and Dr. Garry McDonald (Market Economics), Anita Wreford is co-leading a workpackage aiming to deliver the tools to enable stakeholders to ex-ante identify key risks, decision points and robust strategies . Defining features will be system-wide consideration of impacts, multi-scale applicability, adaptation to new information, rapid deployment, and stakeholder-led co-design.