Emergency management and logistics responsiveness: A study of the Christchurch earthquakes, 2011

Effective emergency management in readiness and response phases before and after a disaster can often mean the difference between life and death. A key enabling factor is the logistics of deploying personnel, life-saving equipment and humanitarian materiél, and relief supplies to and within affected areas. Yet logistics as a function is often subordinated to other seemingly more pressing activities during a disaster and also in emergency management doctrine in general. As such, we examine New Zealand’s civil defence and emergency management (CDEM) logistics capabilities and its response to an actual disaster event. We conducted a survey of 84 CDEM managers and specialists at national, regional and local levels. We supported this with a further seven face-to-face interviews with senior CDEM managers and triangulated our data against a review of secondary sources and academic literature. The devastating series of earthquakes that began in Christchurch on 22 February 2011 is the context we used to analyse the performance of the New Zealand’s CDEM sector and its humanitarian logistics response function. We found that while New Zealand possesses a robust framework of emergency management legislation, a National CDEM Plan and related policies, the implementation and performance against this framework was fraught with deficiencies. At the time we highlighted a number of areas that required urgent policy attention to reduce future risk, and we revisit these to see what’s changed. We argue that our findings have clear implications for emergence management and humanitarian logistics in developed countries