What Aotearoa And Taiwan Can Learn From Each Other About Disaster Resilience

On 23 September 2025, Typhoon Ragasa struck Taiwan from the east. The rainfall filled a barrier lake deep in the Matai’an headwaters, causing it to breach and release 60 million tonnes of water downstream. Within hours, a metre of mud swept through the main street of Guangfu Township. Nineteen residents, mostly elderly, tragically passed away.

In the days after the flood, tens of thousands of volunteers streamed from across the island into Guangfu, armed with food, cleaning supplies, and spades. They set to work shovelling mud out of buildings and roads. Three weeks later, I spent a weekend helping locals deliver furniture around the neighbouring Tafalong village. By then, the streets were clean and the signs of damage were subtle: a faint white line running above waist height along shop fronts; uncles sitting on stools in the sun, rebuilding the low brick fences that separated their houses.

Workers cleaning up outside Taipei Main Station after a typhoon. Image credits - Tom Wilson/supplied

 As a New Zealander, I was struck by the similarities to recent events back home. In 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle swept through the east coast and washed forestry debris into communities across Tairāwhiti. Like the Guangfu floods, the first days of the storm saw emergency services, local councils, NGOs, and community groups work together to take care of their people. Marae played a crucial role: from the beginning, they had moved quickly to identify who needed help, give them shelter, and connect them to welfare services.

The climate challenges for New Zealand and Taiwan

These stories are not exceptional. Public conversations about climate change are now focusing less on how to stop it from happening, and more on how to adapt to its impacts. Last month, New Zealand’s east coast was hit again by Cyclone Vaianu, followed days later by the Wellington region’s worst flooding in 50 years. This month, the Climate Change Commission released its first national climate risk assessment – the starkest picture yet of the risks that climate change already poses to essential infrastructure, community wellbeing, the natural environment, and public services.

While Taiwan and New Zealand are far apart, the climate challenges they face are similar. Both are small democracies in the Pacific, exposed to extreme weather events which are becoming more frequent. When natural disasters hit, both countries must coordinate supplies and support through rugged and complex terrain. Many of the communities most impacted by these weather events are rural, remote, and disproportionately indigenous. As these events intensify, they are increasingly exceeding the capacity of government-led responses, putting even more pressure on communities to step up.

Both countries are increasingly seeing disaster resilience as something that depends on support from across society. Like New Zealand, Taiwan’s disaster response system is heavily decentralised, relying on networks of district officials, large NGOs like the Tzu-Chi Foundation, 里 or neighbourhood chiefs, temple committees, private businesses, and residents’ associations. But both countries are now grappling with the same question: what support do these groups need to work well together in a crisis? Coordinating so many moving parts remains difficult.

Mud still caked on the train tracks at Guangfu Station after the floods. Image credits - Tom Wilson/supplied

What we can learn from one another

Each country holds expertise which could help the other as they work through these challenges. Since 1999’s catastrophic ‘921’ earthquake in Nantou, Taiwan has built impressive capabilities around citizen preparedness and mobilisation, including widespread training and the creation of locally led ‘disaster prevention communities’. These systems have helped to dramatically reduce casualties in recent disasters like 2024’s 7.2-magnitude Hualien earthquake. Taiwan has also taken a sharper focus on protecting critical infrastructure, encouraging major firms like TSMC to develop business continuity plans which have minimised disruption and economic impacts from crises. These issues continue to be a challenge for New Zealand.

 New Zealand, too, has built a strong culture of institutional learning. After disasters like the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River mine tragedy, national inquiries led to policy overhauls in areas like building regulation and workplace health and safety. The country’s disaster response system has increasingly recognised and drawn on the expertise held within marae, iwi, and Māori organisations. And honest conversations are starting to take place around whether some of the most exposed communities may need to start a process of managed retreat. These areas of progress mirror many of the questions that Taiwan’s decisionmakers are exploring right now.

Despite these shared challenges, there has been surprisingly little exchange between the two countries on disaster planning. Most of their official cooperation is underpinned by the ANZTEC agreement, which supports the trade of goods and services between the two economies. Iwi Māori and indigenous Taiwanese tribes are increasingly building their own connections around shared whakapapa and commitments to linguistic and cultural revitalisation. Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy provides a framework for working with its Asia-Pacific neighbours, including New Zealand, on disaster resilience issues. Countries like the Philippines have already taken steps to formally partner with Taiwan on these matters. What has held New Zealand and Taiwan back from doing the same?

Steps towards cooperation

Working together more closely could have real benefits for both sides. Both countries are embarking on ambitious disaster planning reforms: New Zealand’s Emergency Management Bill aims to empower local communities and iwi in emergency response, while Taiwan’s whole-of-society resilience initiative seeks to involve all parts of society in planning for both natural disasters and military threats. The success of these reforms depends not just on the work of governments, but of NGOs, iwi and tribal authorities, and academics. These experts have valuable perspectives and lessons that they could share with one another. Emergency response is inherently messy. Both countries have as much to learn from each other’s ‘gentle failures’ – those moments when response systems do not work as planned – as from their successes.

We don’t need to wait for formal infrastructure to be put in place. Taiwan and New Zealand already hold many connections built on 關係 and whanaungatanga. Cooperation can start small and build over time. But when the next storm hits either country, it is clear that they will need to improvise, adapt, and learn again. The question is whether they will do it alone.

 -Asia Media Centre

Banner Image - Landscapes near Guangfu. Image credits - Tom Wilson/supplied