New Zealand's Dynamic Pathways for Resilient Planning

Summary: New Zealand has more than a decade of experience in adopting Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) approaches, such as Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning (DAPP) to manage climate-related risks such as flooding and sea-level rise. These approaches help navigate uncertainty by stress-testing policy options, mapping alternative futures, and using “signals and triggers” to adjust actions before thresholds are crossed. Rooted in community engagement and inclusive governance, DAPP avoids locking in maladaptive outcomes and integrates different knowledge systems into long-term planning. Applications span national and local levels: coastal adaptation, flood management, conservation, agriculture, infrastructure, and military planning.

New Zealand’s national guidance embeds DMDU approaches, specifically DAPP, into formal policy, fostering complexity-informed, values-based, and transformative decision-making. Despite some gaps in Indigenous partnership and ecological integration, the country’s experience highlights the power of adaptive strategies to manage systemic risk. DAPP’s success lies in flexibility, collaboration, and foresight—hallmarks of a robust climate resilience framework. This case study is part of ASRA’s Systemic Risk Response Case Studies series—find out more in From Benches to Boardrooms: Responding to Systemic Risks.

Case Study: New Zealand's Dynamic Pathways for Resilient Planning

Overview: Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) approaches such as  Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning (DAPP)  have been used to help manage flood risk and build climate resilience from Miami to Bangladesh (Haasnoot, et.al., 2024). Over the past decade, DAPP has been applied in New Zealand to help reduce the risk of pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding, and manage other hazards and situations of deep uncertainty (Lawrence, et. al. 2025).

Recovery and rebuilding have been top-of-mind following a series of climate-related disasters, including flooding in Auckland in 2023, and Cyclone Gabrielle which devastated the North Island the same year. Experts in DMDU have described these events as an “urgent opportunity” to explore “sustainable recovery pathways” that “do not lock in undesirable future outcomes, but maintain flexibility in the face of worsening and changing climate change risks” (Lawrence, 2023, p. 2).

In 2024, the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment issued its revised “National Guidance on Coastal Hazards and Climate Change,” recommending use of DMDU approaches including DAPP (New Zealand Ministry for the Environment, 2024), and presenting a 10-step decision cycle for creating a robust coastal adaptation strategy (DMDU Society, 2018). Separately, New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) has invested in the development of DMDU and DAPP approaches in a range of risk areas, including flood risk management, coastal hazards strategies, rail sector climate change adaptation planning, and military infrastructure procurement (Lawrence, et. al. 2025). 

DAPP applications in New Zealand are exemplary systemic risk responses owing to their focus on uncertainty and adaptive planning. The DMDU Society, a professional association, notes that New Zealand’s approach is “underpinned with values-based community engagement, and uses signals and decision triggers for monitoring and adjusting pathways to meet objectives over time” (DMDU Society, 2018). In the context of climate change adaptation, this means that decisions are flexible and avoid locking in ineffective strategies or large transition costs which fall on future generations (Lawrence, 2023, p. 2).

Highlights in Systemic Risk Response

A systemic risk response encompasses any action that deliberately seeks to mitigate, prepare for, adapt to, and/or transform away from the harms of systemic risks. This case study highlights the power of adaptive strategies to manage systemic risk.

Complexity and Uncertainty

A systemic risk response acknowledges unknowns and makes space for reflexivity and refining. It incorporates contextually sensitive adaptive planning and supports learning, testing, and iterating. These features are embodied in DAPP approaches.

New Zealand’s Guidance on Coastal Hazards outlines ten steps to create a robust adaptation strategy. This iterative approach enables users to develop “short-term actions and long-term options,” via a set of alternative pathways, each leading to shared objectives (New Zealand Ministry of the Environment, 2024, p. 102). These pathways are “stress tested” to assess their sensitivity to different climate and socio-economic scenarios. The DAPP steps provided under the Guidance are as follows: 

1. Steps 1 & 2: Assess what is happening and why.
2. Steps 3 & 4: Establish what matters most by identifying objectives as well as thresholds to be avoided.
3. Steps 5 & 6: Co-create actions by identifying options and interlinked pathways, and stress-test them for their sensitivity to future climate change.
4. Steps 7 & 8: Develop an adaptive strategy with signals and triggers that can be monitored for change, and measures for implementing the strategy.
5. Steps 9 & 10: Deploy a monitoring strategy which gives time to review changes in impacts and objectives, and to adjust responses before thresholds are reached.

Multiple Ways of Knowing

Social and cultural indicators can also be used. One example comes from New Zealand’s Clifton to Tangoio Coastal Hazards Strategy, which also incorporates DMDU approaches. It stresses the importance of mana whenua, the rights of Māori tribes, as Indigenous Peoples of the region, including Tangata Whenua’s membership in a joint governance oversight committee thereby integrating inclusive worldviews and understanding in decision making. (Lawrence, et. al. 2025).

A key feature of systemic risk response related to multiple types of knowledge is identifying relevant metrics for planning, management, and evaluation. DMDU-DAPP approaches use signals and triggers to monitor the efficacy of policy responses and discern when an adaptation threshold is close to being reached. This gives decision-makers sufficient warning about the need to change their planning and pathways. In the context of New Zealand’s guidance on coastal adaptation, the signals that could be tracked include sea-level rise, impacts on drainage or seawalls, and/or the frequency of coastal flooding or erosion (New Zealand Ministry of the Environment, 2024, p. 114).

New Zealand’s Guidance on Coastal Hazards recognizes that it is preferable for signals to “appear early in the impacts chain,” giving more time for decision-makers to respond. A challenge, however, is that an early signal may fail to convince leaders to change pathways, unless several different signals can be used as validation. The Guidance recognizes that surprises can still occur under DMDU-DAPP approaches, and that “setting a signal is not a guarantee that an adaptation threshold will be avoided.” However, having a stress-tested plan can help with responses in the heat of a crisis (New Zealand Ministry of the Environment, 2024, p. 114). 

Transformation

As well as adopting DMDU-DAPP to enhance planning for climate change adaptation in coastal areas (New Zealand Ministry of the Environment, 2024), New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has invested in DMDU-DAPP research and implementation in several areas (Lawrence, 2023, p. 4). The following cases demonstrate potential for transformation through community adoption and integration into decision-making and plans::

1. Department of Conservation: DAPP has been used to build pathways for relocating huts in alpine areas and for translocating vulnerable species away from predators and humans.
2. Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research: With support from the Ministry for Primary Industries, this research institute has used DAPP to help identify risks and opportunities in agriculture, drawing on stakeholder workshops, expert interviews, crop modelling, and local climate projections.
3. National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA): Researchers conducted DAPP assessments to stress test two New Zealand wastewater treatment plants, allowing for more robust decision-making regarding their future (Allison, et. al., 2024).
4. New Zealand Defence Force: The military hosted a series of DAPP strategy workshops to “combine existing policies with national best practice for collaboratively evaluating risk and co-designing adaptation pathways.” 
5. Mākara Beach: This small coastal community applied a scaled-down DAPP process for long-term adaptation planning. With support from councils in Wellington, it held workshops and developed 17 adaptation pathways, while considering environmental, cultural, and social values. 
6. Tasman District Council (TDC): In 2018, the council launched a Coastal Management Project, following the Ministry for the Environment's 2017 Coastal Hazards and Climate Change Guidance. The project focused on raising community awareness of sea-level rise and responses leading to the development of DAPP plans for the region's coast. 

Key Insights and Lessons Learned

The DAPP DMDU approach introduces a new model for planning and policymaking in many areas, including climate change adaptation. It identifies robust adaptation pathways, uses stress testing to assess the conditions under which those pathways will be effective, and applies signals and triggers to guide decision-makers on which of these pathways to follow to meet adaptation objectives. The key to the decision making is that options are stress tested against a range of scenarios of the future, giving DAPP as an approach its robustness as the climate changes. With over a decade of implementing Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty approaches such as DAPP across multiple government departments, combined with community engagement, the approach is deeply rooted in understanding and navigating complexity and uncertainty related to systemic risk response. Key insights relating to implementing systemic risk response include:

1. Recognize and design for deep uncertainty: Given the range of DMDU applications in New Zealand and globally, a network of DMDU-DAPP practitioners has emerged to share experiences (Haasnoot et al. 2024). One of the lessons shared at a network symposium in New Zealand in 2023 was to “avoid investments that ‘lock in’ problems for the future in the same exposed places where damage has been or will be experienced.” Participants noted that one way to do so is to embed risk assessment and uncertainty into design standards for adaptation, mitigation, and development (Lawrence, 2023).
2. Work across multiple scales, identifying critical points of intervention for action: From a governance perspective, the symposium’s participants stressed that formal collaboration between local and central governments is critical to successful DAPP strategies, as is involving Indigenous Peoples who have historic and territorial rights over land (Lawrence, 2023; Lawrence et al. 2025). 
3. Identify and enable all actors to fully participate and contribute: Despite some DAPP processes in New Zealand engaging Māori groups, notable barriers remain, including under-resourcing and a lack of recognition of iwi (tribes) as partners. Capacity-building is needed to address those gaps and ensure more equitable and sustainable adaptation outcomes (Lawrence et al. 2025). While DAPP has advanced adaptation planning in New Zealand, there are opportunities to further integrate Indigenous knowledge, improve implementation pathways, and develop more robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Addressing institutional barriers to implementing adaptation plans based on DAPP and building capacity for adaptive planning remain key challenges (Haasnoot et al. 2024). 
4. Recognize the need to include consideration of ecosystems and species: DMDU-DAPP experts also found that there “is a general lack of understanding of the importance of natural systems to the adaptive planning process” (Lawrence, 2023).