Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change is already affecting many weather extremes in Aotearoa New Zealand and in every region across the world. Additionally, lest we forget, we are also exposed to other risks, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and epidemics. How do these risks affect our wellbeing, throughout our lives, and what are the risks they pose to our ‘human capital’? This lecture will offer a possible framework to consider these risks to our wellbeing and identify ways to start to quantify them. We will also examine some of the available evidence about viable policy tools that might be used to mitigate some of these risks.
Video recording
Captions for this video are available by clicking on the CC icon.
Transcript
Vicki Plater (00:00:44):
[speaking in te reo Māori] Kia ora everybody! E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e rau rangatira mā. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Ko Vicki Plater tōku ingoa. He manu taki ahau o Te Tai Ōhanga.
Kia ora! Welcome everybody to the latest in Te Tai Ōhanga, the Treasury’s Wellbeing Report Seminar Series. My name is Vicki Plater. I am a director here at the Treasury. Amongst the areas of my responsibility include climate change, labour market, education and skills issues. So, I am very delighted today to be able to welcome Ilan Noy for our seminar series today.
And as I was just saying to Ilan, I've not seen a piece of work before that actually brings together the human capital dimensions associated with climate change and natural hazards. Tend to see it more thinking about environmental or financial, economic perspectives, but not human capital, so I think this is really interesting work. So let me introduce Ilan to you. Ilan is the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change Te Āwhionukurangi at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. His research and teaching focus is on economic aspects of natural hazards, disasters, and climate change and related topics in environmental, developmental and international economics.
He is also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. Ilan previously worked for the University of Hawaii, and he consults with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the American Development Bank, and has with the OECD, UNDRR, the IMF and ASEAN. So, it is a great joy to be able to have Ilan working on these really important issues.
Just as we get started, I just encourage you, please feel free to put any comments or questions in the chat. The intention is that Ilan will speak for about an hour, and then I will navigate through the questions that are in the chat so that we can have some Q&A for the remaining time. And with that, I would like to pass across to Ilan. Thank you.
Ilan Noy (00:03:14):
[speaking in te reo Māori] Tēnā koutou. Ko Ilan Noy tōku ingoa. Kei Te Āwhionukurangi ahau. E mai ana. Nō Israel ahau.
[speaking in Hebrew]
Thank you very much, Vicki, for the kind introduction. This is my fourth time giving a talk at Treasury. So, I'm grateful that somebody's still willing to listen. I do promise that all of this is based on new work that we've been doing in the last few months. So, this is not going to be a repetition of my previous talks at Treasury, except maybe a little five-minute interval at some point. This is largely based on work that I've been doing with the World Bank and especially with Ines de Marcos, but several other people are involved, including German Caruso and a few others. We are working on, well, the impact of climate change on human capital, so that's the topic of my talk today.
Let's start with just for fun presentation of climate change. This is the date in which the cherry blossoms, blossoms in the main temple in Kyoto every year. And you see that in the last few years that it has been blossoming earlier and earlier. So, we clearly see one footprint of climate change in this type of data. So last year, the date was March 26th. This year it was March 27. So, these are all very, very early dates, so very clear imprint of anthropogenic climate change. Of course, there are 1,000 others, similar graphs that you can show for various other phenomenon that climate changes is causing.
What we focus here today is on the way climate change has an impact on human capital. So just to define what I mean by climate change and human capital, climate change is the anthropogenic change in the intensity of heat waves, of floods, of other extreme weather events, sea level rise, and other ecosystem changes that are anthropogenic in nature. So being caused by the greenhouse gases that we've put in the atmosphere in the last 150 years or so.
By human capital, we refer to the knowledge, the skills and the health accumulate throughout our lives that enable us to realise our productive potential. So, what I'm focusing in this talk is the way that climate change has an impact on human capital. There is also, we could look at the way human capital has an impact on climate change, but this is not the focus of today's talk because what we're trying to identify, I think in this wellbeing series is, what are some of the risks to wellbeing, specifically in Aotearoa?
So, what do we do in this framework I'm proposing today? We think, well, there is climate change and climate change has an impact on human capital through three different ways. Climate change leads to direct impacts on the economy, on the environment, and those impacts have an impact on human capital. But because of those impacts, we also have two responses, and those responses are the mitigation efforts, which we'll define in a minute, and the adaptation efforts. And both of these also have an impact on human capital. So, we are not only looking at the direct impact of climate change on human capital, but also the way mitigation and adaptation have an impact on human capital.
So broadly speaking, this is the framework we're interested in. Climate change at the top. So, climate change can be increased temperatures, increased average temperatures, increased extreme temperatures, the increase in frequency and intensity of weather events, sea level rise, and other environmental impacts. And then it works through these three channels, mitigation, impacts and adaptation.
The way those have an impact on human capital is through two possible channels. One is directly on health, nutrition, and wellbeing. On wellbeing, you can think of about it in the way we use it as mental health. And then the other channel is through its impact on economic systems and infrastructure and those economic systems and markets, and infrastructure have in themselves impact on human capital. And then we can differentiate between those impacts of climate change during the life cycle. So, there would be a different impact, for example, in the early stage of life in utero to 5 years to maybe 60 and above, so the elderly. And we are trying to identify separately, mitigation impacts and adaptation separately through health and nutrition and economic system and separately through each stage in the life cycle.
Now human capital, the impact on human capital can be an impact on the accumulation of human capital, but it also can be so on our ability to accumulate human capital. So for example, to accumulate knowledge through education, or it can also have an impact on our ability to use the human capital that we already have, to use it productively or to protect the human capital that we already have from being diminished. So, for example, for our health to deteriorate or for our knowledge to become irrelevant.
So just to stick with the definitions impacts, we refer to the direct consequences of the interaction of anthropogenic climate change with human and natural systems. Mitigation is the human interventions whose aim is to reduce the amount of GHGs greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And adaptation is the adjustments that we make, the policy adjustments that we make, or it could be policy. It could be just households adjusting to the actual, or maybe even to the anticipated changes in the climate. So we are differentiating between direct impact, mitigation and adaptation.
Just a little bit about of a cautionary note here, I'm employing an economics lens because, alas, I'm an economist. And I apologise for that, but in economics, the way we think of economic research, we generally think of three types of research, formal theory. Formal theory largely is not very interesting with respect to climate change or hasn't been up to now because the theory is pretty straightforward. All we need to do is increase the price of carbon and then we can do mitigation, and everything will be great. So, all we need to do is an ETS that encompasses everything or some kind of tax on carbon.
The empirical causal analysis that is the second stream of economic research is largely based on existing data, and existing data of course only refers to the present and the past and not the future. And a lot of the concerns we have about climate change is in the future, although not all, and we'll get to that. Or structural modelling, and that has been the main tool that economists have looked at climate change up to now. But I think there is a lot of parameterizations, a lot of quantities that are missing in this structural modelling. And because of that, I think up to now, at least the structural modelling of climate change has largely been to be polite, useless. So, there are some limits in the way that economists have looked at this. And to some extent, those criticism apply to what I'm going to describe here.
What we do in this project, we are looking at those, all these. So, every one of these little boxes essentially describes to you one either impact, mitigation or adaptation of climate change, one stage in the life cycle. And through those two various channels in each one of those boxes, we are trying to assess the degree of intensity of the effect that we described and the degree of amount of reliability of the evidence that we have. Okay?
Now I'm colour blind, but at least my co-authors are not, and what I think you can see is that the colours at the top seems to be more intense than the colours at the bottom. We know more about the early stages of life than we know about the later stages of life, which is the bottom rows. Why do we know less about that? Largely because it's easier to do economic research on the early ones. So again, this does not necessarily mean that there is less impact, but just that we are given the constraints of the economic tools that we use, that I've just described. That's what we know. And I can talk a bit more about that later.
So, in terms of impact, the main impact that we can identify with the current tools that we have in economics is the impact of extreme weather events. And when I talk about extreme weather events, of course, geophysical risk and extra-terrestrial risks are not related to climate change at all. But a lot of the impacts that we know, that we can identify given the economic tools that we have, we can more clearly identify them for example, for earthquakes. And because from an economic perspective, these are very similar phenomena to say, a big flood or a big hurricane or typhoon, we think that the lessons we learned from looking at earthquakes are also applicable to the extreme events that we tend to associate with climate change.
So, to some extent, I'm also going to mention things like earthquakes, even though they're not related to climate change. But the other four are clearly related to climate change, hydrological, meteorological, climatological, and biological disasters are related to climate change. Of course, we know a lot less about the links between biological disasters and climate change.
Just to give you an example, there has been a hypothesis that COVID 19, the emergence of COVID 19 is to some extent related to climate change, because ecosystems are being constrained. There's more wild animal and human interactions. And because of that, that zoonotic jump from a wild animal to humans, it was made probably in Wuhan at some point in 2019 became more likely because of climate change.
There are other stories around biological risks that might be increasing with climate change, but we know a lot less about that. So, this is not something we can easily quantify and I'm going to ignore them. But I am going to look at other types of events like floods, storms and droughts.
In terms of what we think climate change is doing to those types of events, when it's shifting, this is an example for precipitation, for rainfall, it's shifting the curve to the right. There is generally speaking going to be more rain globally because of climate change, but the main impact is going to be intense, the main impact in terms of what matters to us.
You can think about it either as events becoming more intense, which is basically the horizontal part of the shift, or events becoming more frequent and as the vertical part of the shift, but it's the same shift to the curve. So, when we're trying to differentiate whether the events are becoming more intense or more frequent, that actually is the same phenomenon. So, I'm not going to sort really pay attention to that distinction here. Okay.
Just to give you an example of what we can know about the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, this is from another piece of research that we've done on hurricane Harvey in the city of Houston. I'm not sure if you at home or in the office or wherever you are, can see the slide clearly. But what we can identify basically is the flooding part that happened in the city of Houston in 2017, that is related to climate change.
So would've been flooding anyway, but there was additional flooding because of climate change. The details here don't matter, but we can identify actually for each building in the city of Houston how much of the flooding that they experience is because of climate change. But we show in this piece of research that extra flooding is associated with some kind of an ethnic bias, in a sense towards Latinx owned properties or Hispanic. This is not a topic of my talk, but I'm just showing that's one way to think about the extreme events and climate change. And that's what we want to do here.
Just another sort of aside, this is a sort of an assessment globally of what is happening to extreme weather events because of climate change. And the numbers there basically is by how much is the probability of those events occurring is changing because of climate change. So, if you look at, for example, heat waves, heat waves, or at least the heat waves for which we have done those calculations are becoming 77% more likely because of climate change.
Now, the range is different in different locations and in different types of heat waves. So, some heat waves are ... that's the point there, the one there at the top, those events are heat waves that would not have been possible or would've been as the climate scientist call it virtually impossible without climate change. But some other types of heat events maybe are only 20% more likely because of climate change. And you can see the range of changes in the likelihood of these events is different across different types of events. And you can look there at the bottom right, cold events are not surprisingly becoming less likely because of climate change.
Of course, we used to call it global warming rather than climate change. So, it seems obvious that cold events are less likely in most locations. Again, some locations potentially may have a different impact. So, from that piece of research, we can show if we're interested in, and this is sort of the last, I think slide before I actually delve into the human capital aspect, that the annual cost of climate change in terms of extreme weather events, we calculate it to be $150 billion. That's not a trifling sum, I think even when you sit at the Treasury.
And if we think about it, the last Conference of the Parties, the last COP in Glasgow, the whole discussion was about how do we make sure that we spend $100 billion a year on both adaptation and mitigation. But here we already argue that the cost of climate change just in terms of extreme weather events is already $150 billion a year. So clearly our numbers don't add up in terms of how much we're willing to spend on this problem.
Okay. So, what I want to do from now on is basically talk separately about impacts, about mitigation and about adaptation and delve in a little bit about what we find in terms of the impacts on human capital. So here you can see the impacts, the direct impacts channel to which climate change has an impact on human capital. You can see that basically those impacts can be experienced across the life cycle where the most of the vulnerability is at early ages and at the later stages of life. Although we have less evidence on the later stages of life, and those impacts can be manifested both directly through physical, mental health and nutrition, but also through impacts on markets and infrastructure. Okay.
When we talk about impacts typically of any extreme events, and here in terms of climate change we are talking mostly still on the impact of extreme weather events. There are other aspects of climate change. We frequently talk about sea level rise. I think largely we talk about sea level rise because of Al Gore and the photogenic pictures that he has done of Manhattan being flooded by six metres of water. Not because this is where the big risk is. The big risk is in the extreme weather events and they're changing frequency and intensity, or at least for now, of course I hope not to be proven wrong, but of course, if the sea level suddenly goes up by two metres in the next 50 years, then we are going to have a big problem.
But what I'm focused here is on extreme weather events. Extreme weather events, the risk from extreme weather events is the hazard itself. So that may be the storm or the extra precipitation or the extra heat wave or whatever it is, that's the hazard. But that hazard has to meet an exposed population which is vulnerable to it. So, we know, for example, I'm sitting here in Wellington, we know that we are not very vulnerable to wind because we have a lot of it. So, we are used to it. In other locations, the same wind strength, the same hazard that we experience here on almost a daily basis would potentially hit the very vulnerable, say housing stock and can cause a lot of destruction. So, you need both the exposure so that the people and infrastructure and so on to be there, and you need them to be vulnerable in order for the hazard to actually turn into a damaging event.
And what we can then think about is at different stages of the life cycle vulnerability is different. Exposure is probably pretty similar because we live in societies, which we have people across the life cycle around us, but vulnerability is potentially very different. And specifically, the vulnerability to impacts is very high at the in-utero and early childhood stages. So, we know, and I'm sure you know that what they call the first 1,000 days of life are very important. The 1,000 is just an arbitrary round number, but we know the earlier it is, the more important it is.
So, the exposure in-utero and in infancy vulnerability is very high to malnutrition. And there's a lot of evidence on that, including malnutrition at the in-utero stage. So, if mom is malnourished or is significant implications for the embryo in terms of its future development, all the way up to adulthood, so we can measure the impact of malnutrition at the in-utero, on adults, there's extra vulnerability to infectious diseases, for example, cholera and things like that.
Stress, we know that stress is also associated with adverse outcomes, even already exposure in utero distress. So that has implications. And here I'm talking about stress caused by say, an extreme weather event or hurricane or whatever it is, or a drought. We know that extreme temperatures are also very important at the early stages of life. So extreme temperatures that the early stages of life, again, have long term implications for human development and contaminations. Again, even in-utero contaminations can have long-term implications in terms of measured at adulthood.
So measured at educational attainment, measure at potentially salaries. So that's another sort of proxy for skill levels. We do know that these are there's very high vulnerability at these stages. So there's a lot of evidence on this, and a lot of evidence because it's really simple to establish the causality here, because all you have to do is compare cohorts that are born with the exposure to say an extreme weather event or to an extreme, let's say a pandemic and compare those two cohorts that were born just before that, just after that, or just near that, to be able to identify these long-term impact.
So just because we can identify clearly, we know how to quantify that, and we have plenty of quantification. So just you think about pandemics. And we all think about pandemics unfortunately in the last three years, we have a lot of evidence that those people who are exposed to what used to be called the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 and to 1920 there's long term implications to human development for those cohorts that were in-utero during that time.
Because the evidence is pretty easy to establish, we have evidence from both lower income countries to higher income countries, but we do know that to some extent, those vulnerabilities are higher in low income, disadvantaged communities. So that could be communities in low-income countries, in high income countries. Doesn't matter, but the more disadvantaged the community is, the more impact there is on from climate change during in-utero and early childhood.
Another aspect that we haven't really been aware of until recently is the issue of epigenetics. So, epigenetics is essentially the idea that those disadvantages that are caused by exposure potentially in utero or at early childhood can be transmitted to future generations through changes in the genetic makeup of individuals. So, we used to think about nature and nurture and how these are two completely separate phenomena, and either you are affected by nature, meaning your genes or nurture. But actually, we realise now that distinction is not that straightforward because nurture can also affect nature, can also affect your genes.
So, to put it differently, trauma, and we're talking here about trauma, say exposure to a ... we have examples of earthquakes, but we have examples of other types of trauma, of hurricanes, of whatever it is or a big flood, trauma can be heritable to the next generation. So, we know for example, that people whose grandmother was exposed to trauma have a different genetic makeup because of that exposure to the trauma. So, this is not passed through nurture, but through nature.
And now there is some science around this, and we know that genes are not genes. And here I'm sort of moving away a bit from my comfort zone because I'm not a genetic scientist, but there's something about the way genes are expressed that can be affected by the environment. So, it's not necessarily that the genes themselves are being changed, but rather the way they are being expressed in affecting us, something around a process called DNA methylation, which is about some kind of a methyl cover to the genes that does or does not turn them on. And that is potentially affected by exposure to, for example, trauma.
So, if a trauma is called by an environmental shock that is caused by climate change, that can have impact for multiple generations. Now, if it has adverse impacts for multiple generations, then of course the impact is much bigger. So, we are underestimating when we think that the impact is only for those people who have been directly exposed to that event, even if they've been exposed to in-utero, it actually progresses to future generations. And there is some very interesting research on that from various places.
Okay, school-aged children. We know that the main impacts of school-aged children and we know that has a lot of impact on human capital is through nutrition. High temperatures are not only related to nutrition, but also related to the ability to concentrate in school, for example. So, with high temperatures, we know, for example, that kids educational performance in testing, for example, in the PISA test, for example, you can show which day the student took the PISA test, and if they took it on a hot day, then they performed worse.
So, if we have consistent high temperatures, especially again, vulnerabilities higher in poorer, more disadvantaged communities, when there is, for example, no air conditioning, then performance in educational attainment will be lower. There's also destroyed infrastructure. So, if these extreme weather events are destroying roads or destroying schools, of course there will be an impact on human capital. And there's also these extreme weather events are affecting the budgets of households and therefore they will reduce their spending on education and health.
We know from a lot of research that when a household's budget is becoming constrained, because for example, it could be an earthquake or a hurricane or whatever it is you typically do not cut spending on nutrition, but you cut these things that were in a sense, easier to cut, first of all, luxuries, but then expenditure on education and health. And only at the end, you got nutrition. If you don't have a choice. So, we know, and again, there's a lot of evidence for that on this reduction in the spending on education, because of these big shocks.
In terms of the adults and the elderly, less evidence, but there is some evidence on declining health because of climate shocks. There is some evidence on lower productivity with high temperatures. So, we know that workers are less productive in periods of higher temperature. And we also know that some of those, if there is a big shock, there might be some people lose their job and who loses their job first is typically those people who are older. So, in a lot of cases that would mean that they cannot be retrained again or find it difficult to find a job again. So, it induces earlier retirements. So, these kinds of shocks can also induce earlier retirements. Again, that's a loss of human capital. Of course, impacts can also include early mortality. Again, obviously a loss of human capital.
Inequities. At the risk of sounding Marxist, and actually Marx is a relative of mine, he's this sort of an uncle of a great grandparent or something like that. So yes, the inequities here are very stark throughout both high income countries, low-income countries. Those impacts are in the vulnerability, and the vulnerability is much higher in more disadvantaged communities. There's a lot of evidence on that, and that's true in Aotearoa, and that's true in Bangladesh, and that's true in basically everywhere.
Okay, in terms of mitigation, so again to remind you, the mitigation is the effort to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, mitigation actions can be things like changing the mix of energy that we produce or use, changing transportation methods to those that are more friendly to emissions or less friendly to emissions and things like that. And what do we have evidence on that?
So, mitigation also has an impact on human capital. It's less of a concern than the direct impacts of climate change, but still we can identify some channels. Again, we don't have that much evidence on it. So, the evidence base is weaker. It's also weaker because a lot of it is prospective rather than has already happened. A lot of the mitigation transition that we are talking about hasn't happened yet. So, this is much more speculative, and given the economic tools and given the fact that economists hate speculation, well, at least when it's not comfortable for them, then we have less research on this.
But overall, I need to make sure that this is clearly understood. Mitigation, there's a lot of benefits to mitigation, lot of co-benefits to mitigation and a lot of benefits potentially to various aspects of human capital. But what we are trying to identify here is the way that mitigation also poses a risk to human capital. So that's not an argument for not doing mitigation, not reducing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We just need to worry about also the negative impacts that it has on climate change. To some extent that has been something that hasn't been thought much about.
To me, there is a clear analogue here between what we have done with mitigation, what we are doing now with mitigation, what we've previously done with globalisation, where we know that there's a lot of benefits to globalisation, to increasing specifically, I'm talking about increasing trade. So, all economists, there's a wide support for that. That's the one policy area where economists agree almost universally on it, that increased trade is good, but our theory says that some segments of society may be harmed by trade. We tended to discount that. Only in the past 10 to 15 years we've realised that actually is a big issue and that there are these communities that are harmed by trade. And we haven't worried about them enough and that has led to a lot of adverse consequences globally. And I think you can all think of, I don't know, the orange clown you had in the White House for a while, or other people like that, where to some extent, that's a result of globalisation.
So, in terms of mitigation, where are the risks from mitigation? On children, there's substantial health benefits from mitigation. So, there's less coal emitted pollution. So, for example, we know that coal is by far the worst greenhouse ... producer of coal generating energy from coal generating. For example, electricity from coal is by far the worst in terms of greenhouse gases, but it's also by far the worst in terms of other coal emitted pollution that is harmful, particularly 0.5 particulate. So, whatever it is. So, if we reduce coal, we are getting a lot of these other co benefits, health benefits for children.
Urban transport is similarly, the more we move out of our car, and we start to use other methods of transportation, the more health benefits we see. So, there's a lot of benefits in terms of health, therefore human capital from mitigation. The adverse impact is in those children who grow up in households whose income might be affected adversely by the transition. So, for example, in places where there is a dependence on carbon producing industries, there might be a negative impact on households. And because of that negative impact on children, on their nutrition, potentially on other aspects of their wellbeing, and because of that negative impacts on human capital.
There might also be an indirect impact through the higher costs of fossil fuels. And in some places, for example, that might mean increases in the price of various things, potentially food, certain food stuffs that will become more pricey. And because of that, again, we might have an indirect impact through nutrition. So, there are risks in terms of mitigation and we need to identify them, and we need to counter them with policy.
In terms of the risks in mitigation on the adults and the elderly, the main risk is job losses. So again, job losses and lower wages in some industries in which are becoming less attractive because they are associated with a lot of greenhouse gas emission. So, it could be the industry directly producing the fossil fuels, but it could also be under in other types of industries. So, mechanics that work on petrol cars, that there's going to be a lower demand and therefore lower wages for their services in the years to come.
So, there will be also changes in relative prices across products. And again, those changes in relative prices, pose implications for job losses and lower wages. That, again, the analogue to globalisation is clear. We knew for decades that globalisation will mean a change in relative crisis. And will lead to job loss in some industries, I think mitigation is not any different. That has implications for human capital, especially because it leads to early retirements of those people who are employed in those industries potentially. So, it's mainly hit those people at the later stage of their career. So, we have extra vulnerability there versus people who are earlier in their career, can easily retrain.
But even those who can potentially retrain so that the 20- and 30-year-olds, there's costs associated with this retraining. Typically, we know from globalisation, that episode of retraining also entails a loss of income. So, people typically, the trajectory of income is increasing, but then they need to retrain to a different industry. They start from a much lower level, and it then start going up again.
So that has implications to human capital. Again, it's a relatively small group. For most people, mitigation is going to be beneficial and there's going to be a lot of opportunities in terms of new sectors and so forth. But there is this group that is losing, and we need to recognise that. And I think if I allow my father to speak again, we need to recognise that. And we need to be more responsible with that than we have been with globalisation and more responsive to those risks, to those groups who are being harmed by mitigation, specifically from this human capital lens.
In terms of adaptation, with adaptation what we mean is we mean the responses of ... again, I'm reminding you, we mean the responses of governments and households to the risks of climate change. So, this is to risks that are already happening or to prospective risks in the future. So, the prototypical adaptation programme we can think of is a managed retreat programme. So, if we have a managed retreat programme, that potentially has implications for human capital. So, the channels through which we identified that adaptation will have an impact on human capital, one sector we can look at is agriculture.
Agriculture, we need to adapt. There's no question about it. So, some crops are not going to be tenable in some locations, and there will have to be a different combination of crops that we grow anywhere in the world. But that also include New Zealand. We lose a lot of human, sort of this learning by doing that. We have acquired over decades or maybe even centuries in how to do agriculture in specific locations and what crops grow and so on. We are losing that knowledge because the environment is changing. So, we will need new types of crops, and we need to develop the knowledge for that. That's a pretty straightforward impact of adaptation on human capital.
There potentially is some issue around demographics. Although, I think that's less relevant throughout Aotearoa. It might mean more to places where the decisions around fertility are dictated a lot by budget constraints and things like that. I don't think that's that big of an issue here. And then we have the issue of migrations. So, these can be internal migrations or external migrations can be managed or unmanaged. And we have the issue of insurance that I want to briefly talk about.
I'm not going to talk more about agriculture and demographic changes because I think these are straightforward and I don't need to talk about them. I do want talk about migration. So, we know, and there's a lot of evidence on that, that there's both benefits and costs to migrations, both again, both internal migration and external migrations. We have a lot of evidence that people's income goes up when they migrate, even when they're forced to migrate.
So, for example, we have interesting work on hurricane Katrina in the US, which pushed a lot of people out of New Orleans unwillingly, but we do have evidence that their job prospects improved as a result of that. So, their long term income has increased because they were pushed out of New Orleans. That does not necessarily mean that their wellbeing has increased, but at least their income has. Okay.
But equally we know that there is a lot of costs associated with migrations. We know, for example, that migrations typically, especially international migrants when they're forced to migrate, or even when they're not forced to migrate, they're really, there is an under-use of their human capital when in their new location.
So, I grew up in Israel. We had a big migration of doctors in the 1990s from Russia. At one point in the hospital, was in Israel, everybody who worked in the hospital was a doctor, including the cleaning staff, including the nurses. Everybody was a doctor because everybody was a Russian doctor, actually. So, this is just an example, but we have a lot of evidence here as well of that. So, there are cost associated with migrations. We know that there are more costs associated with these unplanned migrations. So, it is better if those migrations are done in a preemptive way and managed. And this is both domestically in a local programme of say managed retreat.
Managed retreat has been on the news this week with the international adaptation plan coming out. But we do, even for the managed retreating in a wealthy country like Aotearoa, we have some evidence that shows that there are costs associated with those managed retreats. So, we know that we have one big example of managed retreating here, and that's the Christchurch earthquake, the red zone in Christchurch, which moved 8,000 households to other locations. We have evidence that had adverse income consequences for those households that were part of this threat zone.
Oddly, for reasons we don't entirely understand it had only negative impacts on women and not on men. Why? I don't know to be honest, but we do have this evidence. So even in, I think a well-planned managed retreat programme like the red zone in Christchurch, we have adverse consequences to income, and those adverse consequences to income mainly to adverse impacts on human capital. There's other issues around migration for if it's an unplanned migration, especially, but also potentially managed. There might be stress associated with that. There might be other, even PTSD-type impact. It has clear implications for human capital.
So that's about migration, about the insurance. Well, insurance is not really an adaptation. It's an adaptation policy for the individuals because it really redistributes this individualised idiosyncratic risk to others, but it doesn't really reduce the risk at all. Insurance is not about reducing risk. It's about redistributing risk. So, in that sense, it's not an adaptation from sort of macro Treasury perspective, but insurance, I think is important. A, because we sometimes need misperceive it as a solution to these problems, but it just redistributes the risk. But also, because insurance is changing as a result of climate change, and those changes in the insurance sector can potentially have an impact on households and therefore on human capital.
Just to give you an example, if we look at again, this is an example from earthquake, but I don't think it's any different for other types of events. We know from the earthquake in Christchurch, that in the first couple of years after the earthquake, when CERA at the time, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority was running its wellbeing survey the first two years, the response was my main concern is after the earthquake damages and the aftershocks. Within about two years, the main concern of both households that were surveyed was no longer the earthquake impact and the aftershocks, but my ability to deal with insurance and the insurance issues around the earthquake.
So clear implications on stress and therefore also clear implications on human capital, because we know that stress is related to wellbeing. So, we have a changing insurance system. Private insurance is largely slowly, some cases fast retreating from this issue of climate change. And because insurance is about the unpredictable, not about the predictable and because of that, we have more public insurance involvement in this space.
And there are talks in New Zealand also of extending the reach of public insurance. And those programmes, public, private insurance schemes have an implication for household wellbeing and therefore also on human capital. And here I think, and maybe Christchurch is a good example, even though from many dimensions, the Christchurch insurance cover was very successful. It also, in some sense was damaging to human capital because of this elevated stress and the prolonged time it took to settle claims and on the resulting problems associated with that.
So, we need to make sure that the adaptation that we take in terms of changing our insurance systems is commensurate with this idea of making sure that it is its impact on human wellbeing, it's adverse impact is minimised and that it is beneficial and protects and redistributes the risk the way it is supposed to.
I do want to reiterate again, that in general the economic case for mitigation and adaptation is very, very, very clear. So, I'm not trying to argue that we should be careful about mitigation and an adaptation. I'm just trying to argue that we should carefully think about the impacts of those programmes or mitigation and adaptation programme on human capital. And we need not to repeat the mistakes of the past and make sure that those are geared towards minimising those adverse consequences to human capital.
In terms of policy, there are several suggestions here. Investing in disaster risk management, because a lot of the impact on climate change is through changing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, we need to invest more and more in disaster risk management. To some extent, we have been doing this in New Zealand. So, we started with the national emergency management agency, NEMA. We started with that a couple of years ago. We are spending more on disaster risk management. I think we need to spend more than what we are. We need to worry more about the early warning systems. We're just starting an early warning system, discussions around earthquakes and tsunamis. Haven't really gone that much further there.
We need to make sure that our delivery systems for health and education are very resilient and robust to those kinds of shocks. So, we don't have the vulnerable falling through the cracks and not getting the services that they need during because of shocks. And I think if you want to identify an area where that has been the case, you can think of COVID 19 and psychological services. And as a clear example of where our health system has not been resilient enough, and we haven't been able to deliver the kind of services that we have normally expected to be delivered because of the shock of COVID 19.
And I don't think that it would've been any different if there's been other types of shocks. So, our systems of delivery are not resilient enough to withstand those shocks. We need to worry about contingent social protection policies that make sure that all the adverse possibilities that we have identified, people are protected from them through contingent social protection programmes. So, if we know that managed retreat potentially has an impact on incomes, then we need to make sure that we have contingent programmes in place that account for that.
Including, I want to highlight here the adverse effects of mitigation. Mitigation will have adverse effects on some groups. Those groups are not very large, and we could design safety nets to accommodate that. I think unlike the globalisation where the adverse effects, the groups that suffered are much larger than what we will experience in mitigation. So, in some case, this is an easier case to make an easier policy to embark on.
We also need to have an international perspective because largely I think the biggest risk for us here in Aotearoa from climate change is actually the international one. So, the way that international changes will have an impact on our country, and we need to consider those, including the impact on the human capital elsewhere and how we can alleviate that. Not only in the Pacific Islands, which we clearly view as part of us, but elsewhere as well. Okay. So, in a sense, what I'm saying is we need to mainstream the considerations of these human capital effects in our climate change policies in general, but also in specific things like the public insurance schemes that we are now considering here changing because of climate risks.
There is the other channel of impact as well, the other direction. So better human capital will enable better adaptation and mitigation policies. That is an obvious statement. It hasn't been the focus of this talk, but that does not mean that it's not true and we shouldn't be thinking about that. So, we do need to think about, for example, in terms of education, how we need to make sure that education is geared so that mitigation and adaptation are going to be done in the most efficient and rapid way that we can. We need to invest in reskilling and things like that.
I think that's it for me, I'm happy to take questions. I think I sort of took an hour, which is about the time I was expecting to. I'm happy to take questions.
Vicki Plater (00:57:47):
Thank you very much, Ilan. Just trying to get my camera to come back on. Here we go. That was such a wonderful exposition of some of the different channels by which climate change will impact on human capital. And I guess one of the things that really came through for me is different channels, but it also definitely seems to be exacerbating implications for different groups from climate change.
To start, there's some questions already appearing in the chat. So, I encourage you to keep putting your questions in the chat and I'll start working through some of them to pass them on to Ilan to answer. So, to begin, Robert has commented that, "Part of the reason the impacts of globalisation were more adverse than expected is because labour markets are more sticky than economists like to think. In theory, people will leave failing towns and industries and benefit from newly flourishing ones. But in reality, people are often reluctant to leave the family, friends and the industry they know. How can we overcome this inertia when it comes to climate change mitigation to ensure people aren't left behind?" I think those are issues are related to adaptation and managed retreat as well, but Robert has specifically asked about, mentioned mitigation. Ilan?
Ilan Noy (00:59:10):
So yes, people are reluctant to move, but if we have a lens of wellbeing that might ... we know that for example, social capital and communities are really important for wellbeing. So, it's not only about income. So even if their income prospects are better elsewhere, they may have very good reasons to be reluctant to move if their networks, if there's communities and so on or are in location. So, it's not about convincing people to move. It might be bringing the jobs to them and bringing the opportunities to them rather than assuming, okay, people will relocate as they need arises because people don't relocate.
And sometimes one view of that reluctance to relocate is because they actually have benefits from location that we can't measure. So social capital and so forth. There's also, we know that people are sort of status quo biased, and we know that are these behavioral issues around people are reluctant to change.
And sometimes when you push them to change, they actually end up changing and being happy with it. So here the assessment might be in the particular is exactly what community we are talking about. Why are people not moving? Is it better to convince them to move or for somehow lead them to move? In some cases, we need managed retreat. So, in some cases we need them to. And there, we need to make sure that for example, the managed retreat programmes are done in a way that minimises the social capital costs of that, also potentially offer communities the opportunity to move together if they so desire and so forth. So, I think the issue here is the particulars, but yes, I generally agree with the statement.
Vicki Plater (01:01:21):
Thanks, Ilan. Chris Nees, well, he has a couple of questions, but the first one is of single events versus accumulation. So, in particular, he says, "In terms of assessing the adverse effects from impacts events, are the studies measuring the effects of just a single event or a combination of them? So, as an example, would you expect to see many of those impacts from the Ashburton floods of May last year or this year?"
Ilan Noy (01:01:49):
Yeah, isn't much research on the accumulation of impacts from repeated events. It's more difficult to do this research. So again, I'm referring to that slide that says we are constrained by our tools to look at those specific things. And we do know that these events have adverse impacts potentially long lasting. We have evidence of that from Aotearoa, from other wealthy countries, from poor countries, from wherever. We don't have much evidence on the ... is the repeated accumulation of events worse than ... if you think of two events happening, say in Westport, two floods in the space of two years, is that worse than just having separately two floods? So, is that cumulation in itself a worse sort of exacerbating factor? We don't really know that. And that is a question that repeats itself.
For example, in terms of droughts and farms resilience, droughts are going to become more frequent, but what do we know about three droughts in a row? What does that have an implications for farmers and balance sheets and so forth, and therefore also to farm household income and therefore also to human capital? I don't think we know enough to really say anything definite here.
Vicki Plater (01:03:29):
Thanks. Chris's next question also picks up on a question I had thinking about the distributional effects in different places when you bring in the human capital kind of transmission. So, Chris has specifically said, "Can you talk a bit more about if or how you would see the impacts differing in New Zealand compared with global averages?"
Ilan Noy (01:03:53):
The impact on?
Vicki Plater (01:03:54):
On New Zealand, if you think about the climate change consequences for human capital in New Zealand relative to in other countries.
Ilan Noy (01:04:13):
I'm not sure, actually. I don't think I can make a general statement here. And I think we need to think of each one of those boxes in the sort ... I can quickly find these kinds of tables, and we need to think of each one of those boxes and think, "Okay, is New Zealand less or more vulnerable than say, other countries?" Let's say Australia, or we like to compare ourselves to the UK for some reason. Are we less or more vulnerable?
I mean, I think we do know for example, that we are, to some extent, less successful in protecting the young in disadvantaged communities. So maybe there we have extra vulnerability, but I think that details here really matter. And I don't think we can have a general statement on New Zealand. We need to isolate each one of those boxes and think carefully about, how does New Zealand stack up against other countries?
Vicki Plater (01:05:27):
Thanks. And also, in certain regions or sub zones, I mean, you mentioned vulnerability of particular groups. If I think about areas more likely to flood, then obviously it will vary even more when you get down to smaller regions. Tom has said, "You mentioned the negative effects of stress on human capital, including in Christchurch post-earthquake. How could this apply, for example, if or when the future insurance cover becomes uncertain and has this type of impact been quantified? What kind of metrics could be used to incorporate that dimension of uncertainty and stress?"
Ilan Noy (01:06:16):
So clearly when you don't have insurance, there's more stress than if you do have insurance. So I'm not arguing ... when I said that insurance was a cause for stress in Christchurch I'm definitely not arguing that we would've been better off without insurance, just to clarify.
Insurance is becoming more uncertain. Although to a large extent, we don't have an insurance retreat yet in New Zealand. And my guess is that if we start to have insurance retreat, we will find a public solution to that. I actually don't doubt that we will, but there's clearly issues around stress associated with lack of insurance cover or with the imperfect insurance settlement mechanisms that we have in place in Christchurch after the earthquake.
We can measure that in a way CERA did through surveys, but we can also measure that in other ways. If you're interested in doing research, then we can actually use the IDI, the integrated data infrastructure that Stats New Zealand so graciously supplies to researchers and look at the use of psychological services, for example, as a result of extreme weather events that are imperfectly covered by insurance. Again, we don't really have that much of an example in New Zealand of lack of cover for insurance because up to now insurance has been available, but that is definitely changing.
Vicki Plater (01:07:59):
Thanks. It's also making me think, Ilan, of some of the work around the importance of mental health and mental health vulnerabilities in New Zealand. And again, the kind of cumulation of factors can keep pointing towards some of the same issues and their importance. Going to turn to a question Matt de Boer has asked, "Making good climate policy needs approaches that cross traditional risk silos. Climate risk assessments need to bring together different risks, including risks on natural and built environments, as well as on human capital. Can you please comment on any opportunities for methods to compare risks, impacts, and values that may be otherwise incommensurable?"
Ilan Noy (01:08:45):
I think I need a clarification for that. I'm not exactly sure. This is clearly a complicated issue that needs inputs from a lot of ways of thought and disciplines and approaches. There is no silver bullet here and not one tool can provide the solution. That's definitely not what I'm trying to suggest. I don't think there is ... again, it's exactly which problem are we trying to address? We determine the mixture of tools we need to use. Not sure I have more insight than that.
Vicki Plater (01:09:42):
Matt, I invite you, if you have any follow up to feel free to drop it in. I'm going to take Chair's advantage for a moment as I get to. I was interested in the policy perspectives that you put up towards the end, including thinking about social protection policies to offset adverse impacts, social safety nets. You mentioned public insurance policies. The one I was particularly interested in understanding better was your comment about adaptation policies internationally. I was wondering, does that relate in part to the migration dimension or are there other aspects of international adaptation policies that you are thinking about there?
Ilan Noy (01:10:46):
A lot of it has to do with migration, both managed and unmanaged. And specifically with the Pacific context, we can think of managed migrations that have to do with climate change risks, but not only. Okay. So, if we think of one other type of adaptation, which I mentioned, is agriculture, and the fact that agriculture production is going to change globally. The pattern of which crops are grown where and so on is going to change globally. That has implications on us for what will be our position in the global market for agricultural products. So that implies that we need to think about that.
When we are trying to design our adaptation policies in agriculture, we don't need only to focus on what kind of crops we can grow here with the different changing climate that we are already experiencing and we'll continue to experience, but rather the demand side for our crops will be impacted by the way the rest of the world adapts to their changes. So, we are part of the global community. So, each one of those adaptation programmes that we are doing will be also implemented elsewhere and will have an impact on when we need to respond.
Vicki Plater (01:12:19):
Thanks for clarifying. I'll turn to Christie's question now. "Ilan, are the climate change implications for human capital different to the implications for physical capital from say a macroeconomic perspective?" I'm assuming macroeconomic, Christie. "The main distinction between capital and human capital seems to be that human capital cannot be appropriated. Is there some other difference between the two that I should also be thinking about in this context?"
Ilan Noy (01:12:57):
First of all, it's much longer lasting. So especially, and this is bit more speculative, but if these epigenetic impacts are significant and we know that they exist, but how much of a concern they are, we don't really know that yet. We know that they exist. And we know that the genetic research has shown that, but what is their implications on human capital say two, three generations onward? We don't think of these long-term impacts of physical capital damages. So, I think that is another distinction that is worth mentioning.
And there's also not only the epigenetic channel. We also know that for example, the most important determinant for the education of a child is how well educated their parents are. So, if we have adverse impacts on education, those are lasting through, percolate through several generations because if one generation loses, and we know for example that this generation, the one that experienced COVID 19 lost some education. This is also true in Aotearoa. It's even more true in the Philippines where schools have been closed for two and a half years now, but it's even true here. And we see that at the university where I teach. That has implications potentially for the next generation as well.
So, we do have these longer term issues around human capital that we don't have with physical capital. We also have the issues around, and we mentioned that a little bit about the reluctance of people to move. So, the adjustments in human capital are not as market oriented and not driven by incentives as clearly as changes in physical capital, which are driven by investors and spending and investment in infrastructure and so forth. So, we can target incentives and design incentives much easier for physical capital recovery than we can for human capital recovery, because of all these behavioural quirks of humanity.
Vicki Plater (01:15:35):
I'm going to turn to Max's question next and then go back to Bettina's, because I think it perhaps relates a bit more to that one that you were just talking about. "What evidence is there that psychological services were unable to cope with demand during peak COVID 19, and what lessons are there from that if we are thinking about climate change?"
Ilan Noy (01:15:58):
So, this is not my area of research, although I've started a little bit of research using the IDI to look at psychological services, but I don't really have any insights from there. This is a common that basically is based on media reports and actually personal experiences that I'm aware of, of some failures in the mental health system. And this is actually true globally. There are reports about that in the UK, in Israel, in the US, everywhere almost. There is an overload on the mental health system because of the heavy burden because of COVID 19. So, I don't think it's actually ... not a terribly controversial statement to say that our mental health system hasn't coped sufficiently with this. What was the second part of the question, which I'm?
Vicki Plater (01:17:06):
Was, "Are there any lessons from this, if we are thinking about the climate change implications?
Ilan Noy (01:17:11):
That's not my area. It's not my area of research. I wouldn't presume to know that. Sorry.
Vicki Plater (01:17:19):
Thanks, Ilan. So, Bettina's question is turning back to insurance, "Do you have a view on when and where these kinds of risks should be socialised, for example, where government should take the risk or make insurance in some way compulsory via taxation of some sort?"
Ilan Noy (01:17:45):
First of all, I think there's more need to socialise the risk when it is borne by households rather than when it is borne by corporates or firms and so on. Because for most households, their house is by far their biggest asset. Lot of time, it's worth more than the overall net wealth. If we want to prevent sort of poverty and destitution, then there is a role for public intervention in insurance markets if the private insurance markets are not providing insurance.
So, there's a much stronger case for coverage of residential housing. And of course, we see that in New Zealand where the EQC used to also cover commercial property, but sort of stopped doing that in 1993. I think based on this idea. Now there are other issues around how predictable the risk was. Is it predictable now? Was it predictable when people bought the property? So, there are limits to the responsibility of government to cover risks of which people were aware of and knowingly decided to expose themselves to, okay.
Now where exactly those lists, where that border exactly lies, I think that is a matter for, I think of politics more than sort of economics. We know that generally speaking, when there is a big event, the government is always happy to step in because politically it's much more expedient to step in than it is not to. So, we also need to consider the political sort of drivers and realise that if we don't have explicit insurance, we will have implicit insurance through ad hoc interventions after an event because the political motivation is very, very clear to me.
And we've seen that in a few instances, if you think about the floods in Edgecumbe some years back where the government thought that a lot of people will be uninsured and therefore the government stepped in very quickly and said, "Don't worry. We will also cover the uninsured." It turned out fortunately that there were very few people who were uninsured, but the government was very quick off the mark. This was the previous government.
And so, I think that we need to be aware of that, which argues, and it's much better to have explicit insurance schemes rather than these ad hoc implicit assistance after the fact, because then you can make sure that the right people pay for it. It could be taxpayers, ratepayers, whatever it is, but then I think it's better to have those programmes being explicit. So, I think the border where the government's role starts, it's not that difficult to determine. And we can think globally, we can see where it is in many instances. I don't know if this was a precise enough response, but yeah, I'm happy to be blunt if there is any, but I'm usually too blunt, not, not blunt enough.
Vicki Plater (01:21:16):
I think that was helpful in setting up at least the broad parameters that you see. If anyone has any last burning questions, I encourage you to put them in the chat now, because otherwise you have to put up with more of mine and we only have a few minutes left. But Matt de Boer has kindly taken me up on his offer to try and clarify his earlier question, which was around climate risk assessments. He said, "He's thinking about ways to understand and quantify different risks to prioritise adaptation interventions. So for example, the balance between improving resilience versus reducing exposure." So, I guess I'd take that further and say, do you have a sense about how you might be able to think about prioritising across different adaptation interventions based on this work?
Ilan Noy (01:22:17):
I think quantifications are important. So, the standard way economists approach this is to quantify dollar value and also attach dollar value to various types of costs, including those that are not market based. So, we can think of value of statistical life and things like that that economists use a lot. We can potentially quantify quite a lot. I'm not a terribly fond of that because a lot of times that hides various ethical preconceptions that are sometimes problematic or are too heated and are not made explicit.
There are potentially other ways to do this. So, I proposed some years ago an index called life years to be able to aggregate different types of impacts rather than using dollars, some advantages to that. But even that is not good enough when you're trying to also compare other types of impacts on the environment, for example. I think here there's a bunch of value judgements that we need to reach and those can be reached through consultations, through discussions with communities and seeing what people prioritise. And I think people prioritise differently in different locations and in different cultures and so forth. So I don't think there is one way to do that.
Vicki Plater (01:24:00):
Thanks, Ilan. My last question for you is, based on this work, thinking about natural hazards and climate change and the impact on human capital, are there any particular areas of work that you think you or others are worth exploring further to tease into this more or to think about the different transmission mechanisms?
Ilan Noy (01:24:25):
I think a lot actually. So, if you think of the table I started with, which would take me five minutes to scroll back to. Yeah. But anyway, think I can reach that table, actually here. Every place that there is not very dark blue needs to be worked on, because I think in all of them there are things we don't know. Okay. I already mentioned, for example, the epigenetic channel. I think that's a major concern potentially. If those epigenetic transmission mechanisms are strong and potentially, they are, then that means sort of an order of magnitude change in the impacts of an adverse event in general. And we need to quantify that. So, because without quantification, without measurement, we are bound to mismanage. So, each one of them, I think the elderly are especially a group that we've not researched enough. And now we're talking about 60 plus here.
That is our just arbitrary threshold, but people have the average life expectancy at the age of sixties, probably around 30 years, another 30 years. That's a very long time and that's a lot of wellbeing that we need to make sure that we can provide the best wellbeing that we can, and that in economics hasn't received attention, part of it because of the constraints of our economic tools. So, we know how to measure exposure in-utero because that's basically your location of your birth. We know where you were. We don't really know where you are during those years of life. So, it's much more difficult to identify, and therefore much more difficult to do research, but that doesn't imply that necessarily those impacts are less. So, we need to spend more effort on developing tools that will enable us to deal with those issues we can't look at with the current tool set we have.
Vicki Plater (01:27:15):
Thank you so much. It sounds like we have plenty of work to do. And just that epigenetics plays into the intergenerational dimensions of wellbeing as well, which is really important. And I was also just struck by the phrase you just used, "Without measurement we'll mismanage." So again, there is for lots of further work.
Let me just bring this to conclusion. I want to thank everybody online for joining us today, for participating and for all your questions, but I particularly want to thank Ilan for presenting his work to us. I think you've really prompted us to think about different dimensions that we may have not thought about before. And I am sure that many of us will want to keep continuing these conversations with you both around human capital and other dimensions of natural hazards and climate change that you work on. So, thank you so much, Ilan. I'm just going to close with a quick karakia.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Piki te kaha. Piki te Ora. Piki te Wairua. Hui e, Tāiki e. Kia ora, Tēnā koe
Ilan Noy (01:28:26):
Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for listening.
About the presenter
Ilan Noy is the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change - Te Āwhionukurangi, at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. His research and teaching focus on the economic aspects of natural hazards, disasters, and climate change, and other related topics in environmental, development, and international economics.
He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. He previously worked at the University of Hawai’i, and has consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, OECD, UNDRR, the IMF, and ASEAN.
Wellbeing Report seminar series
At Te Tai Ōhanga – The Treasury, we are developing the first Wellbeing Report - Te Tai Waiora that will be published in November 2022.
This online seminar is part of a Wellbeing Report programme of Guest lectures running in 2022 and 2023.