Priyani de Silva-Currie’s hometown has suffered three one-in-100-year floods in the past five years. And worse, the NZ Infrastructure Commission projects the city’s flood risk will more than double over the next 50 years.
“Look at Whakatū Nelson, where I live, and the adjoining settlement of Māpua may soon be underwater,” says de Silva-Currie. “We are not going to be putting more flood protections up in Māpua. It just won’t happen. The region can’t afford it. So what will happen is that people will have to retreat from the coastline. That’s the reality.”
This may sound a grim assessment, coming from the world’s first Certified Fellow in asset management, but it’s part of the wider context of how New Zealand balances the performance, risk and cost of all its infrastructure – everything from our deep wastewater and stormwater drains to our hospitals.
De Silva-Currie and her firm, Beca, are hosting respected Dutch infrastructure leader Jan Stoker this month, ahead of his speech to the Āpōpō Congress for asset management professionals. Both are speaking at the conference this week – and say floodwater assets are an instance of where flood-prone countries can learn from each other.
You may not know it, but New Zealand was a world leader on asset management – the practice of looking after our existing infrastructure. Now, the OECD ranks us fourth-to-bottom in governance accountability. “New Zealand was an asset management leader of some repute, and we exported this knowledge to Europe, we were world first,” de Silva-Currie says, “And then slowly, slowly, slowly, we’ve started dropping away.”
The Infrastructure Commission says we should be spending 60 percent of our infrastructure funding on maintaining and renewing existing assets; de Silva-Currie calculates that figure may need to be as high as 80 percent.
She has authored a new report for Infrastructure NZ and Beca. It finds that while recent estimates value the country’s infrastructure deficit at more than $200 billion, that doesn’t paint the full picture. Incorporating the full spectrum of lifecycle costs, such as operations, maintenance and renewals, the number is closer to an eye-watering $1 trillion dollars – more than twice New Zealand’s GDP.
“If we don’t make asset management a mandatory part of the overall planning, funding and delivery system now, our infrastructure deficit will only continue to be compounded,” the report warns.
We could put it another way. The country simply can’t afford to spend vast sums on new stop-banks to protect small low-lying coastal communities that were not appropriate for permanent settlements, or new highways that will carry an ever-smaller proportion of our work-from-home population, or stadiums that dwarf the dwindling communities around them.
It’s not just the case that these big new toys shouldn’t be the priority. They’re actually a liability, because they add to central and local governments’ maintenance and renewal bill. Every dollar spent building and then maintaining a new motorway is a dollar that can’t be spent on, for instance, community health clinics to serve growing numbers of ill or elderly people.
The visit from Stoker is a chance to exchange notes and sense-check solutions. After all, the Netherlands’ stop-banks are the most famous human-built flood protection infrastructure in the world, and the oldest – the first dam was built by the Romans.
“We’ve got one of the biggest water barriers that manages nature,” Stoker says. “It’s unbelievable. Yes, and my organisation, my government, is responsible for keeping our feet dry, because the Netherlands is below sea level.”
The threat is not just from the sea, but from the rain right across Europe – because three major rivers, the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt, all flow through the Netherlands. “When we get the rainwater from Europe, we have to pump away massive amounts of water per second.”
It’s not just the coastal dykes and massive pumps that Stoker’s public works agency, Rijkswaterstaat, is responsible for managing. It’s also the country’s roads and bridges.
“With what is going on in Ukraine in the past two years, it brings a totally different perspective,” he says. “How do we move that Abrams tank from Rotterdam to Germany, when you don’t have the bridges that can carry a 50-tonne Abrams? You know, that’s mind-blowing for us at this moment.”
If Stoker were advising a New Zealand council or utility today, he’d warn against some common mistakes: waiting for the perfect data or, alternatively, starting with the technology instead of the decision. Organisations buy systems, dashboards, sensors, digital twins or AI tools before they are clear about the decision they need to improve, he says.
Instead, he’d recommend they:
(a) Establish a leadership-owned asset management system – without that, asset management remains a technical activity rather than an organisational way of working.
(b) Invest deliberately in training, education and certification. Councils and utilities need credible people who understand line-of-sight, whole-of-life value, risk, maintenance strategy, asset information, lifecycle planning and the connection between technical and financial decision-making.
(c) Build a reliable baseline for the most critical assets and translate it into funded lifecycle programmes. Do not try to map everything perfectly at once. Start with asset criticality, condition, performance, service consequence and climate exposure for the assets that matter most.
It won’t happen overnight, but Stoker predicts councils or utilities will see results in two years, to materially lift maturity. “It also gives councils and utilities a clearer story to tell communities,” he says. “Why one intervention is funded before another, and how that decision protects service, risk and long-term value.”
Could New Zealand make similar gains in Stoker’s particular area of expertise, reliability-centred maintenance? He’d start with the assets and services that matter most to communities: water, transport, energy, health, ports, flood protection and other critical infrastructure.
“The biggest gain is to stop treating maintenance as an operational afterthought and start treating it as a strategic risk control,” he explains. “What does the asset need to do, how can it fail, what happens when it fails, and what intervention gives the best whole-of-life value?”
That brings us back to those bridges carrying the 50-tonne tanks. Managing and maintaining infrastructure like the Netherlands’ big bridges, dykes and pumps can inform New Zealand – but it also provides a salutary reminder that often, major earthworks and machinery won’t be the answer.
That’s where we come back to de Silva-Currie’s example of Māpua. Part of asset management is knowing what and where to build – and what not to build.
Talking with the pair, they bounce thoughts off each other throughout.
Not only does the European experience inform New Zealand’s asset management, but the reverse is also true.
Āpōpō has been developing a framework that it calls Pou Herenga, that combines traditional methodologies with modern observations. “What Jan is referring to is that in order to be a holistic asset manager, you have to think about humans’ interaction with both nature and each other, and also preserving the world around you – which Māori do instinctively.”
Now asset managers are feeding that into their decision-making.
So, take the example of regular flooding of low-lying areas: “What would Māori have done historically? Well, they probably would have occupied coastal environments only in certain periods of the year, then they would retreat to their traditional strongholds at higher elevations.”
That’s echoed by engineers’ improving understanding of nature-based entropy – the inevitable, natural tendency of ecosystems to move from a state of order toward disorder, complexity, and energy dispersal over time.
“It means we have to be building the right things in the right places, and making sure that we’re in harmony with nature. Yes, we can learn from the Netherlands in terms of fortifying and building a ‘keep the sea out’ environment.
“But we can also think about why we’re putting something in. Look at all of our roads – our roads to nowhere, I call them – where we build roads for the sake of it.
“It’s not necessarily because it provides necessary accessibility for the masses. It might have a very, very limited value to it – but we do that in New Zealand because we want to be able to be able to go everywhere. That isn’t necessarily sympathetic with nature-based solutions.”
Stoker agrees. After first talking with de Silva-Currie and Āpōpō last year, he’s begun importing the Pou Herenga thinking into his ministry. The American Public Works Association has also adopted it.
“In the Netherlands, we solved a lot with technology,” he says. “We are famous for our water management technology, but we forget nature. We forced nature. Now we are stepping back, more.”
De Silva-Currie says Āpōpō has written to Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop – a rare political champion of asset management – recommending capacity building, asset management mandates and the creation of dedicated asset management funding.
The NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi already has something similar. “Where the rubber hits the road, literally, they are doing things according to their plan, instead of reacting to political whim, or creating a half-baked solution.
“They are building resilience into their renewals programme and into their capital programmes. That is all because asset management planning is occurring with regularity. That wasn’t happening. If you’d asked me that 30 years ago, I would have said, no way.”
Āpōpō’s letter was backed by a position paper. “The message from the sector is clear,” it says. “Real progress will not come from isolated funding increases or single policy reforms. Progress depends first on setting the right system conditions – specifically strong governance, disciplined long-term planning, and a renewed commitment to stewardship, all supported by specific capability investment in the people responsible for the asset management function.
“These factors shape whether infrastructure assets are managed proactively over their full life cycles or allowed to deteriorate through incremental maintenance deferral and reactive decision-making.”
De Silva-Currie’s message to the minister and to this month’s Āpōpō conference is clear: New Zealand needs to be planning and working smarter, rather than just throwing money at the country’s infrastructure deficit.
“That’s my personal view. What we’re doing right now isn’t working because we wouldn’t have such poor performing infrastructure across the nation and intergenerational debt. That is not acceptable in any society.”
She says the new methodologies for planning infrastructure and deciding how to build and maintain it are more intrinsically human. “They don’t put infrastructure first. It’s about putting the people first – the delivery of a service to our communities.
“It’s about not creating a burden for future communities, our mokopuna, to have to pay for. Doing that thinking first, before we make expensive investments.”
