Populated Areas of Aotearoa New Zealand

When speaking about hazard management and resilience preparedness, knowing precisely where the population is located is an essential tool to determine the area of vulnerability and amount of help to send for a quick and efficient response after an event. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the population is unevenly distributed across the country, having very densely populated urban areas such as the Auckland region, as well as sparsely populated rural areas such as Stewart Island. Four main geohazards are intertwined in Aotearoa New Zealand, including earthquake, landslide, tsunami and volcanic activity, one possibly causing another with different impacts on localised or national scales. Most of the country, especially the main cities and activity centres, are either crossed with active faults, located above the Hikurangi subduction interface, in mountainous areas prone to landslides, close to volcanoes or located next to the ocean. Thus, an essential element to determine on a national scale is the range of the population exposed and that may potentially be affected by one or more of these geohazards. Building distribution datasets, combined with the population census, are used in this report to develop a new dataset of the populated areas of Aotearoa New Zealand, a way to augment the population distribution resolution throughout the country.