The work

Here’s what this project is all about:

The subject

Climate change and extreme weather events are increasingly testing the resilience of New Zealand's Internet infrastructure, when Internet access is a critical part of everyday lives and a lifeline for communities during emergencies.

In early 2023, many communities across Aotearoa experienced firsthand how weather-related disruptions to Internet connectivity impact their lives and compound the challenges of disaster response and recovery. Drawing from these experiences and supported by the Internet Society Foundation, this collaborative research initiative will work to strengthen the ability of New Zealand communities to face climate impacts and extreme weather events by improving the resilience of our national Internet infrastructure

The objective, outcomes and outputs

<aside> 🏃🏼

The purpose of this work is to focus on actions, solutions and recommendations: it is action research.

</aside>

We’ll consider this work successful if it makes things better for communities affected by climate impacts and disruptions to Internet infrastructure, both right now and in the future. To produce effective change, we’ll need to work together to understand what’s happened in the past (as well as what’s happening now), but this has to move swiftly to a focus on real change.

We can’t produce effective change without a process that enables full and confident participation by the people and organisations involved. This means that our focus is on both the impact of the work as a whole, as well as the process we follow. This is reflected in the research values we’ve adopted (around practical knowledge and action) and it’s also something we’ll be reporting on directly as part of the work.

<aside> 🗺️

All of this means that the exact nature of the outputs we produce will be something determined by the coalition group. The group will also be deciding which areas of the wider topic they can target to have the most impact.

</aside>

We’ll be suggesting the following kinds of actions and outputs as a starting point to consider:

New actions by research participants as informed by the research.
Collaborative projects developed among participants as part of the research.
Action-oriented recommendations or work plans.
Written, oral, multimedia, or other outputs from the coalition and/or the research team.
Summaries, insights, and reflections drawn from the process and the information shared by the coalition and by others.
A map of key actors and programmes in this space domestically and internationally.
A backgrounder and literature review to help people come to grips with the space.