How the Christchurch earthquakes shook up all of New Zealand

Thursday, 19 February 2026

Urban search and rescue teams, including dogs, scour the rubble for signs of life, or death, in the immediate aftermath of the February 22, 2011 quake, on the corner of Manchester and Gloucester streets.

Reid Basher is a retired senior adviser in the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. He also publishes at reidbasher.substack.com. He lives in Wellington.

OPINION: The impacts of Christchurch’s February 22 , 2011 earthquake were short and sharp on the day, and continued to reverberate over the following weeks and months. Now, 15 years later, we can see the long-term impacts and lessons learned.

A senior Indian government official once told me that all of India’s disaster risk legislation had followed a major disaster event – such as building code upgrades after an earthquake, or food security policies after a prolonged drought.

A Reshaped City: Christchurch 15 years on is a Press series marking the 15th anniversary of the February 2011 earthquakes. (Image created using AI)

King Charles agrees: “There's nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something,” he said. That was while visiting flood-stricken Somerset in February 2014. Okay, he was only a callow young Prince at the time, but he was absolutely right.

Which leads to a lurking question – is it really necessary to have a big disaster like the Christchurch earthquake to teach us what to do? Wouldn’t it be better to get organised and manage the risks in advance? Unfortunately, it seems that most governments find it easier to strengthen the stable doors after the disaster-horse has bolted.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. In Christchurch, the vertical forces were exceptional for a magnitude 6.3 earthquake and surprised even the experts. Emergency managers hadn’t experienced anything so extensively damaging as this before.

Christchurch faced years of roadworks to repair and replace damaged infrastructure, such as in this view of Manchester St in 2014. While the work was a source of widespread frustration at the time, it left the city comparatively well-placed while much of the rest of the country wrestles with infrastructure failures.

Moreover it had been 80 years since our last big earthquake disaster, the 1931 Napier event which killed 256 people. That gap represents a three-generation lull of forgetfulness about how bad earthquakes can be. Let’s hope the same forgetfulness won’t follow Christchurch’s tragedy.

The most obvious long-term impact of the earthquake is the rebuild. The chance to build back better: to borrow, hire workers, construct. People and money and building materials pouring into town. Including billions from insurance and the Government.

The economic impact is obvious to outsiders when they visit Christchurch. Compared to other places, the city is bustling, business seems to be rocketing along, housing and rents are attractive, and jobs are plentiful. A 2025 Victoria University of Wellington study showed a post-disaster increase in overall regional labour productivity in the Canterbury region, especially in Christchurch and in the construction sector.

The insurance industry was pummelled by the cost of its exposure to the Christchurch earthquakes, with one of the biggest local insurers, AMI, needing a government bail-out and ultimately the transfer of its unresolved claims to a Crown company, Southern Response. Protests by customers unhappy over their treatment continued for years after, while the whole country still pays the price as the insurance industry claws back its financial position.

The second, less agreeable, impact concerns the insurance market, munted along with the buildings, and now also under repair. The $20 billion of private insurance payouts heavily depleted the existing insurance/reinsurance pools. Insurers carried the can in 2011, but they had greatly underestimated the risks they were covering. They won’t do that again. The result? Hiked premiums throughout New Zealand, in some cases doubling over a few years.

Roughly $20b was also contributed from the public purse, half from the Natural Hazard Fund, the other half inevitably at the cost of reduced public services and/or increased national debt. The Natural Hazards Commission says the Natural Hazard Fund is now so depleted it could not cope with a big disaster any time soon and needs increased levies to replenish it.

A sweeping clampdown on earthquake-prone buildings launched in 2016 led to a vast nationwide bill for tackling upgrades and saw many buildings closed - including the Wellington public library.

The third key impact has been the strengthening of building codes, via the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Act 2016. Throughout the land, we will become somewhat safer. After all, it’s the buildings that kill people, not the earthquake.

Unfortunately, some building and apartment owners faced huge remediation costs that were wildly out of whack with the life-saving benefits. So last year, the minister changed the rules, saying it would save building owners $8b. Think about this - for nine years the act had demanded billions of dollars of work that is now deemed unnecessary. Risk is tricky for sure, but policymakers really need to do better than this flip-flop.

Two more subtle long-term impacts stand out – public anxiety about disaster risk generally, and concern that the Government doesn’t have a proper grip on managing the nation’s disaster risks.

People are much more risk-aware and risk-literate now, something helped along by growing climate change impacts. Hardly a day goes by without some new headline: “Hazard risk to shape future housing market”; “Government announces shake-up of earthquake strengthening laws”; and “Deadly storms expose growing gap between disaster recovery and climate preparation”.

Even Treasury has tagged the issue, focussing its 2025 Long-Term Insights report on economic shocks (mainly from disasters) and estimating the financial impacts at about 10% of GDP per decade.

One downside of heightened risk awareness is public anxiety, as most individuals have few options for doing anything beyond buying water storage tanks and first aid kits. It’s yet another reason why we need the Government to take firmer charge of disaster risks.

Which brings me to the last impact. Recognition of New Zealand’s feeble disaster risk governance – our institutional capacities to appraise and manage risks.

There’s a real vacuum here. We are miles away from having systematic programmes for risk assessment, targeted risk reduction, risk financing, disaster recovery, and post-event, lessons-learned reviews. The current legislative proposals for planning, natural environment and emergency management only tinker with the problem.

So expect the Christchurch earthquake to keep impacting all New Zealanders for a long time to come. When your house was rocking and rolling, that thought probably wasn’t in mind, but now you know: Christchurch has shaken up the whole of New Zealand.