The recent deaths of eight people in two separate landslides in New Zealand have reignited a difficult national conversation. While investigations will focus on technical questions about what failed and why, a broader and more uncomfortable issue demands attention: why does New Zealand continue to accept the human and financial toll of landslides?
Contrary to popular belief, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are not the country’s deadliest natural hazards. Over the past 200 years, landslides have claimed approximately 1,800 lives in Aotearoa New Zealand more than twice the combined death toll from earthquakes and volcanic activity during the same period.
Landslides are often overlooked because they tend to cause fatalities in small numbers, scattered over time. This pattern dulls the sense of national urgency. Last month’s tragedy at Mount Maunganui, one of the most fatal landslides since 1846, was a stark exception that briefly captured national attention.
A useful comparison can be drawn between car crashes and aeroplane crashes. Road accidents kill hundreds of people in New Zealand each year, often individually or in small groups, and rarely trigger sweeping reform. In contrast, the 1979 Mount Erebus air disaster, which claimed 257 lives in a single day, permanently reshaped aviation policy and remains etched in national memory.
In natural hazard terms, landslides resemble car crashes frequent, deadly, but rarely dramatic enough to provoke systemic change. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, by comparison, resemble aeroplane crashes less frequent but catastrophic when they occur.
However, with climate change driving heavier and more frequent rainfall events, the risk profile is shifting. The question is no longer whether landslides are dangerous, but whether New Zealand is prepared to continue living with and paying for this escalating threat.
Since 2010, central government spending related to natural hazards has totaled approximately NZ$19 billion. Yet 97 percent of that funding has gone toward response and recovery efforts, while only 3 percent has been allocated to risk reduction and resilience building.
In effect, New Zealand continues to pay for disasters after they happen rather than investing proactively to prevent or mitigate them.
The management of landslide risk is governed largely by the Resource Management Act (RMA) and implemented by territorial authorities. Councils can restrict new developments in high-risk areas. However, they face significant limitations when dealing with existing properties due to established land-use rights.
Although some land-use rules have been successfully modified to reduce exposure, such cases remain rare. The impact of recent reforms to the RMA on landslide risk management is still uncertain.
Recent disasters have also revealed shortcomings in coordination among local councils, emergency services, central government agencies, and insurers. A high-level inquiry in 2024 recommended a more integrated and streamlined response system for hazards such as floods and landslides, highlighting gaps in responsibilities and delays in information sharing.
New Zealand’s landscape contains many features conducive to landslides: steep slopes, weak rock formations, saturated soils, and areas where forestry has recently been cleared. However, the likelihood and severity of a landslide also depend on subtler variables, including slope shape, orientation, and vegetation cover.
The most common type of landslide in New Zealand is the shallow slide, typically one to two metres deep and affecting only the upper soil layer. Despite their relatively small size, these slides can be highly destructive, carrying hundreds of tonnes of debris at high speeds.
Water-saturated debris can behave like a liquid, flowing along natural channels and traveling several kilometres, extending the area at risk well beyond the initial slope failure.
Although scientific understanding of landslides has improved significantly over recent decades, important gaps remain. Because landslides are highly localized, effective risk assessment requires detailed local data. Yet national inventories remain incomplete, particularly in regions such as Northland and the Bay of Plenty. Existing studies are often inconsistent or difficult to compare.
These knowledge gaps complicate efforts to assess how climate change will affect future landslide risk. While research suggests that increasing storm intensity will likely amplify landslide activity in already vulnerable areas rather than expand risk into entirely new regions, projections remain uncertain.
As former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer once remarked, those seeking natural hazards will find them in Aotearoa. The country faces a complex array of threats, including landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tsunamis, liquefaction, and wildfires. Managing these risks while maintaining affordable taxes and public services presents a significant challenge.
However, as landslide-related costs and fatalities continue to mount, local authorities attempting to implement long-term risk reduction strategies often encounter resistance framed around fiscal constraints.
While budgetary pressures are real, the long-term economic burden of repeated disasters is likely to grow. Experts argue that the most cost-effective time to invest in resilience is before disaster strikes.
New Zealand has already signaled that certain levels of preventable death are no longer acceptable. The Ministry of Transport’s 2019 Road to Zero strategy declared road fatalities intolerable and committed to a systematic reduction in risk.
A similar shift in perspective may now be needed for landslides.
With a national election approaching, political parties have an opportunity to present credible and comprehensive strategies to reduce natural hazard risk. Some observers argue that landslide resilience, in particular, demands a bipartisan approach to ensure sustained progress beyond electoral cycles.
The central question remains whether repeated fatalities from a well-documented and worsening hazard are something New Zealand is willing to tolerate.
Unlike sudden catastrophic disasters, landslides do not command prolonged public attention. Yet their cumulative impact measured in lives lost, communities disrupted, and billions spent on recovery suggests that the time for incremental change may have passed.
Investing in resilience today may not only save money in the long run but also prevent tragedies that have, for too long, been accepted as part of life in a hazard-prone nation.