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Societal risk-to-life from natural hazards: Assessments, acceptability and actions at Whakaari/White Island and Piopiotahi/Milford Sound, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: At Whakaari/White Island, New Zealand in 2019, 22 people involved with commercial sightseeing tours were fatally injured in the crater of an active volcano because of a sudden eruption. That this event was perceived by society as unacceptable is demonstrated by national and international media coverage and the legal actions that resulted from the event. A simple “average” risk analysis demonstrates that this foreseeable disaster lay well beyond widely-used criteria for the acceptable level of societal risk-to-life, although the individual risk-to-life appears to have been close to acceptable provided that individuals were adequately informed. At Piopiotahi/Milford Sound, an iconic tourist destination and World Heritage Site in Fiordland, New Zealand, risk-to-life exists from coseismic landslide-triggered tsunami, although no such event has occurred there in recorded history. Re-examination of earlier analyses, informed by landslide-tsunami modelling for a similar fjord site in Norway, shows that the societal risk-to-life at Piopiotahi/Milford Sound, including the risk to visiting cruise liners present in the Sound, lies even farther beyond acceptable norms than at Whakaari/White Island. Again, individual risk-to-life appears close to acceptable. At Piopiotahi/Milford Sound the only feasible means to reduce the societal risk to acceptable levels is to reduce visitor numbers by a factor of about 1000, but this seems unlikely to be economically, societally or politically realistic. This situation highlights difficulties in the use of widely-used acceptability criteria for societal risk-to-life in sociopolitical decision-making.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105325
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,200
OpenAlex ID: W4407794103
FWCI: 3.626
Cites: 35
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10