Disastrous futures? Confronting the scale, urgency and complexity of our crises: introduction to the special issue

The severity of a disaster is a function of social arrangements. Social science scholars identify concentrations of population and wealth as the two great drivers of disaster risk. Aotearoa New Zealand is one of the most urbanised (Department of Internal Affairs Citation2021), unequal (Rashbrooke Citation2021) and, consequently, disaster-prone countries in the world (Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery Citation2021). London-based insurers Lloyds (Citation2018) rank New Zealand second in the world for disaster risks as measured by annual expected losses as a proportion of national GDP. All the more reason to worry, then, that the National/Act/NZ First coalition government is halting emergency coordination system work as part of its public sector cuts (Pennington Citation2024), backpeddling on climate commitments (Thomas Citation2024), rolling back the regulatory apparatus (Norman Citation2024), and generally displaying an aversion to evidence-informed policymaking (Meyer and Walters Citation2024). This country has long been considered a practical social science laboratory for good and ill, from experiments in systematic colonisation (Barber Citation2020), to its pioneering social democratic legislation (Phillips Citation2012), to its embrace of neoliberalism (Kelsey Citation2015), to its recent COVID-19 pandemic response (McClure Citation2021). Given the material above, we suggest that Aotearoa New Zealand is also an important social science laboratory for studying life in the Anthropocene.