The recent magnitude 6.3 earthquake near Te Anau, and the tsunami warning that briefly followed, were a reminder that New Zealand’s biggest seismic risks don’t always stay where they’re expected. Resilience is no longer just about compliance or retrofitting after the fact, but about how buildings and infrastructure are conceived from the outset.

That shift has become more pronounced since the 2022 revision of the National Seismic Hazard Model, led by GNS Science in the wake of the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes. The update lifted the countrywide estimate of seismic hazard by an average of 50%, but the impact was not uniform. In some of the country’s main centres, the model suggests hazard levels have roughly doubled, forcing engineers to rethink what “normal” ground shaking now looks like.

That matters immediately for builders. A public consultation draft of the revised structural design standard, DZ TS 1170.5:2024, is intended to replace the 2004 version that has underpinned seismic design for years. In practice, that means new buildings in higher-risk areas are likely to be designed against tougher assumptions, with stronger expectations around performance, detailing and repairability after a major shake.

The implications aren’t limited to new builds. Much of the country’s building stock was constructed before modern earthquake-prone building rules and before today’s stricter understanding of seismic risk.

Territorial authorities are required to use a standard methodology to identify earthquake-prone buildings, and that work has been gathering pace. Nationally, the proportion of buildings assessed for seismic risk has risen from under 5% in the years after the Canterbury earthquakes to around 85% now, with full coverage targeted for 2030.

The remediation picture is also changing. Of the buildings identified as earthquake-prone, about 40% have now either been strengthened or removed, with two-thirds the target by 2030.

That progress reflects a broader shift in how owners, councils and insurers now view seismic resilience. It’s not an optional upgrade but part of the baseline cost of doing business in New Zealand.

New-build compliance has followed a similar trajectory. Compliance with building codes for new construction is now around 95% nationally, up from roughly 80% in the years after the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, with a 98% target set for 2030. That tightening is already shaping project budgets, procurement decisions and insurance requirements, especially in city centres and on critical infrastructure projects.

The same logic is influencing infrastructure planning. The lesson from Christchurch, and from the broader development of the government’s National Infrastructure Plan, is that resilience must be built in from the start rather than retrofitted after a system fails under pressure. Councils and infrastructure agencies are increasingly applying that thinking to water, transport and stormwater systems, where redundancy and recovery time can matter as much as cost.

Monitoring is doing more of that work than it used to. GNS Science operates GeoNet, which gives agencies something they didn’t have before Canterbury, which is a live picture of how the ground actually behaves rather than an estimate drawn from historical records alone. The practical effect is that resilience planning can be revised as the evidence changes, instead of after the next event has already made the case.