Integrating Indigenous Community-Developed Consequence Functions into Conventional Inundation Risk Modelling: An Aotearoa New Zealand Case Study
This paper presents a methodology for integrating iwi-led qualitative knowledge into the quantitative RiskScape modelling platform through a case study with Rangitāne o Wairau, demonstrating how codifying Indigenous consequence functions reveals the severe cultural and emotional impacts of tsunami scenarios that conventional economic models overlook.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine you are trying to measure how much damage a flood will cause to a town. Usually, governments and scientists use a very specific ruler for this: a money ruler. They ask, "If the water rises one foot, how many dollars of houses and cars will be ruined?" This is like measuring a storm only by how much it costs to fix the broken windows.
But for the Rangitāne o Wairau people (an Indigenous Māori community in New Zealand), this money ruler misses the most important parts of the story. To them, a flood isn't just about broken buildings; it's about losing connection to ancestors, feeling deep spiritual sadness, and damaging the land that feeds their families.
This paper describes a new way of building a risk calculator that includes these invisible, non-monetary losses. Here is how they did it, explained simply:
1. The Problem: A Ruler That Only Measures Money
Think of the current risk models (called RiskScape) as a calculator that only has a "Dollar" button. If you ask it about a tsunami, it tells you the financial cost. But it has no button for "Heartbreak," "Cultural Loss," or "Spiritual Pain." For the Rangitāne community, these feelings are just as real and damaging as a broken wall, but the old calculator couldn't see them.
2. The Solution: Building a New "Multi-Tool" Calculator
The researchers worked directly with the Rangitāne community to build a new set of instructions for the calculator. They didn't just guess; they listened to 19 family members and walked the land with them to understand exactly what matters to them.
They turned these conversations into a four-part scoring system:
- Cultural Disruption: How much does this break the connection to ancestors?
- Economic Loss: How much money is lost? (The old part).
- Emotional Stress: How much spiritual or mental pain does this cause?
- Ecological Damage: How much harm is done to the plants, animals, and food sources?
3. The Translation: Turning Stories into Numbers
The hardest part was turning feelings into numbers that a computer could understand.
- The Analogy: Imagine you have a recipe for a cake. The old recipe only listed "flour" and "sugar." The Rangitāne community said, "We also need 'love' and 'memory'."
- The Process: The researchers created a "translation guide." They asked: "If the water is 0.5 meters deep, how much 'Emotional Stress' is that?" The community said, "That's a lot." They assigned a number (like a score of 0.7 out of 1) to that feeling.
- They did this for different water depths (Low, Medium, High, Severe) and for each of the four categories. This created a new "depth-damage function"—a rulebook that tells the computer: "If water is this deep, it causes this much cultural and emotional damage."
4. The Test: Running the New Calculator
They tested this new system with a scary scenario: a massive tsunami (like a 9.0 magnitude earthquake) hitting their coast.
What the Old Calculator Would Say:
It would look at the land and say, "Oh, some vineyards and houses are underwater. That's a lot of money lost."
What the New Calculator Said:
It looked at the same water and said, "Wait. The water is hitting the Beach and Bay areas. For the Rangitāne, this isn't just about money.
- Emotional Stress: 98.3% of these areas are rated as having "Severe" emotional impact.
- Ecological Damage: 86.8% of these areas are rated as "Severe" damage to the land.
The new calculator revealed that the emotional and spiritual pain of losing these specific ancestral lands is almost total, a fact the money-only calculator completely missed.
5. Why This Matters
The paper argues that this new method is like adding a new lens to a camera. You don't have to throw away the old lens (the money one); you just add this new one so you can see the whole picture.
- It's Modular: Think of the calculator like a Lego set. The "Emotional Stress" block can be swapped out or adjusted by the community later if they want to change the rules. It doesn't break the whole machine.
- It's Transferable: Other Indigenous groups can use this same Lego set. They can build their own blocks based on their own stories and values, without needing to start from scratch.
The Bottom Line
This paper shows that you can take deep, complex cultural stories and turn them into numbers that help governments understand risk better. By doing this, they ensure that when disaster planning happens, the "heart" of the community is counted just as heavily as the "wallet."
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