In 2023, New Zealand’s Social Wellbeing Agency developed an interactive data dashboard called the Community Insights Explorer (explorer tool) to assist with the response and recovery from adverse weather events that happened in February 2023 in New Zealand’s North Island.
New Zealand’s Community Insights Explorer
Abstract
In early 2023, New Zealand’s North Island had several major weather events resulting in widespread damage in specific areas. The social impact of these events was not distributed equally. Some communities were already extremely vulnerable in terms of social need, with many facing poor access to services, low incomes, low employment, and poor health and education outcomes. Many of these communities were also severely affected by flooding events in 2023.
The Social Wellbeing Agency created the Community Insights Explorer to provide local leaders and decision-makers with data to help them deliver supports and services more effectively. The explorer tool brought together publicly available and new data in one place for decision-makers and communities.
The data was sourced from the IDI (Integrated Data Infrastructure), a large research database that collects individual level data about people and households. It includes administrative data about education, income, benefits, migration, justice, and health sourced from government agencies, Stats NZ surveys, and non-government organisations (NGOs). The data is integrated at an individual level and de-identified to remove personally identifying information such as name, day of birth, and address.
The explorer tool collates relevant well-being indicators and is intended to supplement and support community-level information and intelligence. New data sources can be added to it. The tool provides data on three themes: people, housing and households, and employment and income. The tool has 26 indicators, including a disability indicator and housing status indicator. The data can be filtered by region, territorial authority, and suburb.
Alongside this tool, the Social Wellbeing Agency partnered with environmental science firm Dragonfly Data to test whether satellite data can be mapped to small suburb areas to understand in a detailed way the current and future well-being needs of affected populations. In partnership, they created an interactive impact mapping tool, which is embedded within the Community Insights Explorer tool.
The interactive map uses satellite data to visualise flooded areas, deposited silt and slips, in combination with socio-economic information. The interactive map of cyclone impacts was overlaid with infrastructure and demographic data, which will help decision makers and social service providers better understand the impact on these communities.
The physical impacts of the cyclone – flooding, slips and silt – are displayed in layers on the map. Users can also choose to display features such as the percentage of area impacted, the length of roads, farmed area, and buildings, schools, hospitals, and supermarkets within an impacted area. Another layer displays an area’s deprivation index. The New Zealand deprivation index is an index of socioeconomic deprivation based on census information.
The Community Insights Explorer provides a detailed and suburb-level understanding of community well-being alongside actual flood impact. This information was critical to inform recovery decision-making, especially in informing the allocation of funding, resources, and services within communities.
Dragonfly Data Science, Cyclone Gabrielle impact map website, https://www.dragonfly.co.nz/work/cyclone-impact-map.html (accessed 19 April 2024)
Regional Economic Activity Web Tool, Deprivation index in New Zealand website, https://webrear.mbie.govt.nz/summary/new-zealand?accessedvia=bay-of-plenty (accessed 19 April 2024)
Regional Economic Activity Web Tool, New Zealand website, https://webrear.mbie.govt.nz/summary/new-zealand?accessedvia=bay-of-plenty (accessed 19 April 2024)
Social Wellbeing Agency, About the Social Wellbeing Agency website, https://swa.govt.nz/about/about-the-social-wellbeing-agency (accessed 19 April 2024)
Statistics New Zealand, Integrated Data Infrastructure website, https://www.stats.govt.nz/integrated-data/integrated-data-infrastructure/ (accessed 19 April 2024)
OECD, How’s Life in your country? Country notes, New Zealand, https://www.oecd.org/wise/measuring-well-being-and-progress.htm#country-notes
