Media
Biking through the future in Ōtautahi
A collaboration between ecologist Will Godsoe and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
9 December 2024
At an undisclosed location on the campus of Lincoln University, on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, I enter a neglected bike shed whose interior can be charitably described as… punk. The “floor” of asphalt is a mess with leaves. Then again, the shed is surrounded by student dorms, so the old leaf smell is comparatively nice. I unplug my ebike, sneak past the other bikes in the shed, and shove open the heavy corrugated metal door.
I think of my e-bike as a hedge against disasters, big and small. On the one hand using bikes like this is one strategy to mitigate the pollution that causes climate change (i.e. a big disaster). On the other hand biking reminds me to fit exercise in my schedule to reduce my high blood pressure (a potentially personal disaster).
I don’t have to look that far for a reminder of disasters. On my left is the site of the old Hilgendorf Building. In 2009 this concrete University building was named a “brutalist classic”. The 2011 Canterbury earthquake damaged the building so much that it was abandoned. It was a skeleton when I first came to campus in 2014, then a demolition site, then a lake. Ten years later I zoom past its replacement, Waimarie – coated head to foot in solar panels.
I then zip into town along a broad and sealed bike lane following an abandoned railway line. Along the way, I keep an eye out for old friends cycling towards Lincoln. There are a couple of friends that I’d probably lose touch with in the absence of such opportunities. I’m rewarded by a beautiful sunset over the Southern Alps.
When I get to my daughter’s school the parking lot is a massive traffic jam of cars, but we soon saunter past and go down the “southern expressway”: a new bike lane towards town. There is presumably another traffic jam between Riccarton Road and the Riccarton Mall, but I don’t give it a second thought.
It’s Friday, so we stop for pretzels in Punky Brewster, a pub in an old warehouse along the bike trail. My wife meets us and we bike through Hagley Park and past the electric tram to get to a community event in town. At the memorial bridge we spot Mulletman and his unicycle show. Not wanting to miss “the world’s leading expert in follicular entertainment” we park our bikes right next to the show and watch for a few minutes. We are then right in town to look for a family outing, such as dancing at the dance-o-mat or a busker’s festival.
Biking through Ōtautahi gives me a vision of the future. I say this guardedly. These days it seems like visions of the future all concern dystopias – versions of a future where the only things worth talking about are wreck, ruin and the apocalypse. It’s easy to draw a dystopian vision of Christchurch where the recovery from earthquakes is the cherry on top of all the other worries of the world. However, biking through Christchurch (on the right cycleway) can be sunny, socially dreamy and cosy – at most it is apocalypse adjacent.
Instead of a dystopia, biking through Christchurch is closer to what novelists have started to describe as solarpunk. It is a vision of the future where disasters such as those caused by climate change occur, but people find value in building a better future in their aftermath.
This can be on a global scale like in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, where the pollution causing climate change is arrested using tools ranging from airships to bureaucratic banking reform. Or it can be small-scale like in Susan Kaye Quinn’s Planting the shell bones, in which the main character hides in an old light house and covertly creates new oyster beds with sea shells.
Compared to fictional solarpunk, Ōtautahi’s better future is down to earth, visible and in some cases quite literally concrete. It includes reminders of the need for disaster preparedness, including a litany of broken buildings and carparks from the 2011 earthquake. These are placed side-by-side with the tools to reduce the pollution causing climate change.
There is new technology (such as my ebike), changes in policy that make me free to use that technology safely (thank you bike lane), and nudges to do things I value (stop for sunsets, and an easy trip into town for a show). It’s a future of electric trams winding their way through downtown, and the residential red zone rendered uninhabitable by the earthquakes transitioning to a regenerated green space.
The future is often unimaginable, sometimes hopeful, sometimes big and scary. Taking a bike ride through Ōtautahi reminds us that unimaginable things happen and we need to get on with them in our lives. With any luck we’ve already prepared for them. Some of the unimaginable things will be bad – like the decade-long recovery from the earthquake. Some of them will be great – like biking under cherry trees to get to downtown festivals.
Will Godsoe is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini who seeks to better forecast how species will respond to climate change and other environmental disturbances.
Jean Donaldson is a designer and illustrator who works with Toi Āria: Design for Public Good. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at https://jeanmanudesign.com/.
Changes to the Marsden Fund and Catalyst Fund
5 December 2024
The New Zealand Government’s decision to restructure the Marsden Fund and Catalyst Fund is more than a simple budgetary adjustment – it is a pivotal moment.
This decision comes in the context of international pressure on research funding, and lack of understanding of the value that researchers bring to our society. This rift partly explains why we have reached this moment. We have an opportunity to engage in a productive national dialogue to highlight the fundamental role of research and researchers in our society.
By narrowing research funding to a prescriptive economic lens, we risk undermining the complex ecosystem of knowledge production. Researchers are critical independent advisors who generate insights that transcend immediate fiscal calculations. Their work generates systemic value through innovative problem-solving, policy development, and societal understanding that often yields unpredictable yet profound economic and social benefits over the long term.
The most pressing challenges of our time – climate change, technological disruption, social inequalities – defy simplistic disciplinary boundaries. They require nuanced, interdisciplinary approaches that integrate quantitative and qualitative perspectives. An example close to home is that both modelling flood risk and understanding social resilience is crucial to the recovery and flourishing of communities affected by recent natural disasters.
Leading research institutions globally, including the International Science Council, emphasise the necessity of diverse scholarly engagement that centres human complexity across multiple scales. To create true innovation, our research infrastructure and funding needs to support intellectual diversity, collaborative thinking and a commitment to understanding our world’s complex challenges.
- Marsden Fund refocused for science with a purpose – New Zealand Government
- Catalyst Fund updated for global impact – New Zealand Government
He takitākinga ki te whakarauora taiao ki te tāonenui
Image: Erana Walker with Te Pūnaha Matatini Co-Director Cilla Wehi.
2 December 2024
Kua takahia kua tākina e Erana Walker te ara ki te whakarauora taiao ki te tāonenui. Ki tōna wā kāinga ake, ki roto o tōna whānau ake, he āhua māmā te whai o te kaitiakitanga ki reira. Ēngari mō roto o iwi kē, ki wāhi kē, he mana whenua anō o reira hei aha koa te tini o ngā mata-ā-waka, ngā tūākiri, ngā whakapapa kē atu.
Nō tāna āta tirotiro i te whīwhiwhi o ngā hononga o waenga o ngā tāngata whenua, o ngā mata-ā-waka, me te taiao tāna tuhinga mō te kaitiakitanga ki ngā takiwā tāonenui. Kua whakamihatia e te New Zealand Ecological Society, kua whakawhiwhia a Erana ki tā rātou tohu ‘Oustanding Publication on New Zealand Ecology.’
He whakahirahira ki te ao Māori ki te 80 paihēneti o ngā iwi/Māori kei ngā taonenui e noho ana. I ētehi wā he uaua kē te hono a te tangata ki a Papatūānuku ki te takiwā o ngā taonenui. He hirahira anō taua uaua ki te kore te tangata e whai whakapapa ki taua takiwā. He aukatinga nō te tauwehenga mai i te ūkaipō, me te kore mārama ki aua takiwā tauhou.
Heoi anō he kaha kē ake te whai a ngā iwi/Māori mē he whakapānga ki ngā mātauranga iwi taketake. Kei aua māramatanga mai he tiaki i te whakarauora o te taiao me te haere ngātahi o te akiaki i ngā tikanga a te manawhenua, he whaiora mō te taiao, mō te tangata.
Ko Erana tētehi pia o Te Tira Maurikura o Te Pūnaha Matatini. Ko ana kaiāwhina ki tēnei rangahau ko Tim Jowett o Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou rātou, ko Cilla Wehi ko Hēmi Whaanga tētehi o ngā pou rangahau o Te Pūnaha Matatini ko Cilla Wehi tētehi o ngā tumuaki o Te Pūnaha Matatini. He mahi ngātahi tēnei pepa, he whai whakaaro ki te whīwhiwhi o te kaitiakitanga ki te takiwā o ngā taonenui, ko tā ngā pou rangahau he tūhura i taua whīwhiwhi, he whai kaha hoki ki te manaaki i a Erana hei pia o te rangahau.
Ko tā rātou otirā tā Erana, he akiaki i ngā kairangahau, kai mahi, kai whakamahere, kai whakatika kaupapa here, taea noatia ngā rōpū whakahaere ki te mahi ngātahi me ngā mana whenua o ngā rohe e tirohia ana kia whai wāhi mai ai ngā tukanga ā-iwi taketake ki roto o ngā mahinga a te hapori ā-taone huri noa.
***
The Waitaua Stream flows past Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Rawhitiroa in Tikipunga on its way to the Whangārei Harbour. It was here that Erana Walker (Te Parawhau, Ngāti Rua Mahue, Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Te Rangi) got her first taste of environmental restoration.
The Waitaua Stream is culturally important to the hapu of Whangārei, and Erana worked alongside the local council, other schools and other community groups to restore the stream, and grow the consciousness in her whānau, hapu and wider school community about the stream.
Erana says that this was her springboard into environmentalism, although she doesn’t like to use this term, because it’s really the realm of kaitiakitanga – looking after te taiao the natural world. Being involved in a restoration project was comfortable in Whangārei, where Erana had the backing of her community to do so, but restoration work became more challenging after she moved to Hamilton – within someone else’s tribal boundaries.
This got Erana thinking deeply about the complex interrelationships between tangata whenua who have whakapapa connections to urban spaces, mātāwaka who have settled in these spaces from other tribal lands, and nature. This is reflected in the recent paper that she led on cultural stewardship in urban spaces, which has just been awarded the Outstanding Publication on New Zealand Ecology award from the New Zealand Ecological Society.
80% of Māori in Aotearoa live in urban areas. This affects their connections to place, culture, identity, language and knowledge. Erana’s paper explores the results of a survey of 214 urban Māori, who shared their perceptions of kaitiakitanga, cultural practices and restoration activities.
Image: 80% of Māori in Aotearoa live in urban areas.
By analysing the survey results through the lens of mātauranga Māori, and layering qualitative and quantitative approaches from social science, ecology and statistics, Erana and the team were able to generate rich data that provides actionable insight for improving ecological restoration in urban areas.
It is important for people to connect to nature, but in urban areas, this can be harder to do. “Urban spaces are hard places to exist for a lot of people,” explains Erana. “Whether you’re young or old, whether you’re a migrant person, whether you’re from another area or hapu or from the local communities, there’s so many layers happening in urban spaces.”
People want to connect to nature in urban spaces, but what does that mean if they don’t have a whakapapa connection to a place? Erana’s research found that disconnection from tribal areas and limited knowledge in urban areas were barriers to these practices for urban Māori.
“The most pressing challenge is the difference in knowledge between age groups,” explains Erana. “Our survey data showed that older participants are really knowledgeable about kaitiakitanga, and they have experience that is really beneficial to share – but our younger people don’t. For me, that’s a really big challenge, but also a great opportunity – if we can bring these age groups together in some form of restoration project, our older people can share the kōrero tuku iho of the area, and our younger people can utilise that to create their own form of ecological restoration in urban spaces.”
Image: Kaumatua are knowledgeable about kaitiakitanga and have experience that is beneficial to share. Tom Roa and Te Waiarani Harawira at Waikirikiri Marae in April 2024.
The survey showed that Māori were more drawn to restoration that was culturally framed, making them likely to participate in ecological restoration organised by marae or iwi communities than by local councils or government. This insight provides a clear opportunity to guide targeted approaches to restoration activities, an approach that requires complex systems thinking.
Understanding the challenges for Indigenous peoples to express stewardship in urban spaces may benefit restoration efforts and encourage Indigenous populations to have better connection and care of nature in cities.
“There is a clear opportunity to transform urban spaces through Indigenous concepts and knowledge,” Erana writes. This cultural knowledge can help to enhance ecological restoration spaces, while also supporting opportunities to express cultural practice – increasing the wellbeing of both nature and people.
Erana is part of Te Tira Maurikura, a community for Te Pūnaha Matatini’s emerging investigators. The team that supported her in this research included University of Otago statistician Tim Jowett, and Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Hēmi Whaanga and Cilla Wehi. The paper was a team effort, in which each author brought their expertise and perspective to explore the complexity of kaitiakitanga in urban spaces and to support Erana to grow as a researcher.
Erana encourages restoration practitioners, planners, policy makers and governance organisations to engage directly with their Indigenous communities, and move beyond aesthetic representations to integrate Indigenous knowledge, value systems and practices into the fabric and function of urban areas. For policy makers and city planners, this means moving beyond linear frameworks for intervention planning, and embracing complexity.
“Urban spaces are people’s homes, and they have rich histories and rich cultural practices,” says Erana. “We should be providing spaces for people to share this knowledge and these important practices with the wider urban community.”
Cultural stewardship in urban spaces: Reviving Indigenous knowledge for the restoration of nature – People and Nature
Introducing our first guest artist: Sione Faletau
28 November 2024
At Te Pūnaha Matatini we value the opportunity to work with artists to explore how art and research come together to tell stories about our world. Eager to bring new perspectives to our research, and to create opportunities to engage new audiences with complex systems, we were equally delighted and daunted to receive over 40 applications from some immensely talented artists across Aotearoa New Zealand to be a guest artist with us.
It brings us great pleasure to introduce Te Pūnaha Matatini’s first guest artist: Dr Sione Faletau. Sione is a multidisciplinary artist of Tongan descent, who often translates soundscapes into visual kupesi (patterns) by extracting and manipulating the audio wave spectrum into intricate designs. During his six-months with Te Pūnaha Matatini, Sione will use a talanoa approach to develop site-specific installations in close collaboration with researchers that align with his artistic practice.
To introduce himself, Sione answered a few questions:
Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in art?
Si’oto’ofa Malo e lelei. My name is Sione Faletau, and I am a New Zealand-born Tongan. My roots trace back to the villages of Taunga, Vava’u on my father’s side and Lakepa, Tongatapu on my mother’s side. I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Ōtara, South Auckland. For me, art is a vehicle for creative research and self-discovery – it has become a way to delve deeper into my Tongan heritage and engage with the broader world.
I pursued my studies at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where I honed my skills and began shaping my practice.
Image: Sione Faletau’s doctoral project explored Tongan masculinity from an Indigenous perspective.
What themes or concepts do you explore in your work, and how do they relate to complex systems?
My work often revolves around sound – specifically the audio wave spectrum – as the foundation for visual creation. By translating sound frequencies into visual patterns, I create kupesi (Tongan motifs) that bring talanoa (cultural dialogues) into a visual language. This process embodies complexity, as it intertwines cultural narratives, environmental data, and visual art into cohesive, layered works.
How do you approach the process of creating your art? Do you have any specific techniques or methods you prefer?
My creative process begins with research. I immerse myself in reading, gathering information, and engaging in talanoa. This research phase allows me to deeply understand the subject I’m exploring. From there, I use sound recordings, audio spectrums, and digital tools to create visual patterns. The talanoa often informs both the conceptual and aesthetic aspects of the work, ensuring that it is grounded in cultural and contextual meaning.
Can you share a particular project or piece that you feel best represents your artistic vision and why?
One project that stands out is my commissioned work for The Lightship on Quay Street in Auckland. For this piece, I recorded the sounds of the Ports of Auckland, the surrounding Auckland CBD, and the Waitematā Harbour. These audio recordings were transformed into visual kupesi and displayed as large-scale light led art works. This work encapsulates my artistic vision as it marries site-specific data, cultural storytelling, and a dynamic visual language to engage both the environment and the audience.
Image: The Lightship sparkles across the water in downtown Auckland.
What inspired you to collaborate with Te Pūnaha Matatini, and how do you see your art contributing to the understanding of complex systems?
The potential for collaboration and innovation inspired me to work with Te Pūnaha Matatini. Art and science share a foundation in curiosity and exploration, and both engage with complex systems in unique ways. I see this partnership as an opportunity to explore interdisciplinary connections and uncover new ways of understanding. Through my art, I aim to visualize these complex systems, making them accessible and engaging to a broader audience.
What do you hope audiences will take away from your work, especially in the context of its connection to complex systems research?
I hope audiences come away with an appreciation for the interconnectedness of cultural, environmental, and scientific systems. My work invites viewers to experience the unseen or unheard elements of our world in a tangible, visual form. By highlighting these connections, I hope to inspire curiosity, reflection, and a deeper understanding of the intricate systems that shape our lives.
PhD scholarship on predicting and monitoring lake health using spatio-temporal early warning signals
25 November 2024
Applications are invited for a PhD scholarship to study the health of shallow coastal lakes across Aotearoa, which are mostly in a state of decline.
A number of interventions have been trialled to improve the health of shallow coastal lakes, with mixed success. We need novel approaches to better understand lake health and identify appropriate natural solutions or human interventions to reverse these declines.
Wairewa, a shallow polymictic shoreline lake on the southern side of Te Pātaka o Rakaihautū Banks Peninsula, has had a troubled history. The water is turbid and prone to toxic algal blooms. The customary, highly productive tuna (eel) fishery has been the verge of collapse due to the highly degraded state of the lake.
You will use spatio-temporal early warning signals analysis to develop methods to predict and monitor the health of Wairewa. Shallow lakes are an example of bistable systems with tipping points. This project will develop both temporal and spatio-temporal models of Wairewa, to apply the theory of critical transitions to develop an optimal monitoring regime for lake health.
Eligibility
This scholarship is open to anyone who can be in New Zealand and meets the requirements to enrol in a PhD at the relevant institution. We are happy to consider students from a diverse range of fields including applied mathematics or a similar quantitative discipline. Interested students should have at least some background in differential equations, bifurcations and numerical methods.
No particular knowledge of lake biology is required, though you must at least be willing to learn! The project will also involve significant interaction with groups invested in the health of the lake, including local iwi and environmental agencies. The successful candidate will hold, or expect to complete soon, an honours or masters level qualification, with a significant research project.
Applicants from all countries and backgrounds are actively encouraged to apply. Members of underrepresented groups are very welcome, as are students with families. Our research group aims to achieve work-life balance within a productive scientific environment.
Location
You will be based at the University of Auckland and will work with Associate Professor Graham Donovan and Dr Matiu Prebble.
You will be part of Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for Complex Systems. Te Pūnaha Matatini brings together ‘many faces’ – different disciplines, ways of thought, methods, and crucially, people – to define, and then solve, society’s thorny interconnected problems. Te Pūnaha Matatini has an active whānau group which supports early career researchers, committed to the Te Pūnaha Matatini values of manaakitanga and whakawhanaungatanga, offering supportive tuakana / teina learning environments.
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact Graham Donovan at g.donovan@auckland.ac.nz.
Financial details
- Full tuition fees
- Stipend of NZ$35,000 per year (tax free)
Start date
The start date is flexible, but would preferably be in the first half of 2025.
How to apply
Send an email expressing your interest, along with a CV, academic record, and list of three potential referees to g.donovan@auckland.ac.nz
Due date
Applications will be considered until the position is filled.
Making change in complex systems
25 October 2024
This is the final post in our series on complexity. We’ve explored some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Change happens all the time. Humans grow and age, days shift from light to dark, and people move between cities and jobs.
Some changes are expected and natural – like human growth and ageing. Some are cyclical – like the seasons. And some are the outcome of complex circumstances – like a global financial crisis. Some changes can be anticipated, but others are unpredictable. And some changes are desirable, while others might need to be prevented or reverted.
Sometimes we want to create the conditions for change through human intervention. We can do this as individuals, communities or through other organised efforts of society such as our governance and policy systems.
Our big global problems can seem overwhelming, but by recognising how systems are related, we can create meaningful solutions.
Human intervention within complex systems
Understanding complex systems helps us to figure out how to make the changes we want, and prevent the ones we don’t. Recognising that systems have behaviour – like emergence and feedback – can show us how and where to intervene to create change.
Approaching something like health as a complex system allows us to identify interventions that are more likely to succeed. Doctors often tell people to eat better to improve their health. But choosing what to eat is not the same for everyone. The type of food available to people, their budgets, the amount of time they have, and how much they know about nutrition all affect the food they eat. Because of this, trying to treat health issues like heart disease or diabetes by focusing on individual behaviour will have limited success.
Instead, a complex systems approach to health shows that solutions also include better job opportunities, increasing incomes, creating fairer rules on the type and location of stores where people buy food, and strengthening how much say the community has in local and national government decisions. These interventions create the conditions that make it easier for people to choose healthy food that nourishes them.
Scales matter for making change
Different scales and the relationships between them are important when acting within complex systems. In health, evidence and treatment options will be different when focussing solely on individuals, rather than considering communities. Medications and behaviour changes help to treat and control disease in individuals, but treating the clustering of diseases in local communities requires changes in social and physical environments to prevent individuals from becoming sick in the first place.
Seeing problems from a whole system perspective provides information about what solutions might need to look like. We saw this during Cyclone Gabrielle. In Tairāwhiti and Hawkes Bay, the loss of telecommunications, power outages, and damage and destruction to roading and bridges caused many difficulties for evacuations, and made health services inaccessible. The elderly and people living with disabilities were particularly affected as they could not easily move around, which meant they had difficulties evacuating and getting the help they needed. Without telecommunications, doctors and pharmacies struggled to access patient medical records, and people could not pay for essentials such as medicine, food or petrol with their Eftpos cards.
The consequences of this cyclone crossed different communities, organisations and areas. But not all communities were affected in the same ways, and the evacuation, health and social support needs varied within and across the regions. Multiple and connected social actions were needed to address the impacts as they evolved, and to support those communities and groups most affected in the days, weeks and months following the cyclone.
Learning from the past and adapting to a changing future
Complex systems are open and interact with their environments, which means they have the capacity to adapt and learn.
With repeated extreme weather events in Tairāwhiti over the past 18 months, many parts of the community have been learning and adapting. Lessons have been captured and are helping us become better prepared for future events.
Land use is now a key priority for communities, and there is much stronger advocacy for policy changes – particularly recognising the responsibilities of forestry companies. Others have been adapting in smaller ways by planting up land alongside waterways, or on their own properties. Many whānau, neighbourhoods and communities now have clear plans in place for future extreme weather events.
In the months since Cyclone Gabrielle, a learning system developed through local community groups and organisations working with researchers to help capture the lessons and make changes. The benefits of these lessons will be felt right across the country. As we face more frequent extreme weather events due to climate change, the lessons learned in Tairāwhiti show that we need to be ready with improved infrastructure, and better planning for community resilience.
Understanding complexity supports better interventions
Social, economic and health systems are built by humans, and we can change them.
Instead of only focusing on change to isolated parts of the system, complex systems approaches focus on whole system change. They help us to identify levers like cultural norms or money flows that cross scales, or increasing the ability to adapt through better data and information linked to flexible resource use. We can also design and construct new systems so that they better meet the needs of our rapidly changing world.
We live within complex systems which interact with each other through feedback and emerge from local conditions. And there are ways to design our systems that recognise this – something long understood by many Indigenous cultures with knowledge systems and practices embedded in the relationships between humans and the environment.
There is an increase in social movements that advocate for human-influenced systems to be regenerative. These include: economies that take account of our finite resources; food systems that respond to local needs and their environmental impact; and governance systems that give power and agency to communities to improve local conditions and adapt to changing environments.
In the face of problems like climate change or inequality, it can be challenging to know how best to intervene or contribute towards change. Complex systems approaches can help identify strategies to effect large scale change, whilst acknowledging the power of small local acts that can reach across the boundaries of scales to influence the bigger picture.
This focus on relationships has potential to increase the speed and effectiveness of our responses to large-scale emergencies. A focus on complexity can help us to shift away from isolated, hierarchical action and mindsets.
If we make systems visible and understand how they are connected, we can change them.
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson, Holly Thorpe and Markus Luczak-Roesch, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Spreading: How something travels across a network
2 October 2024
This is the fifth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
On a Thursday afternoon in June, a power pylon toppled over in a small rural area in Aotearoa New Zealand, cutting power to most of the Northland region.
This happened after contractors removed too many nuts from the bolts securing the pylon during cleaning. The seemingly mundane act of removing these nuts led to catastrophic effects: the three unsecured legs of the pylon lifted, the tower toppled off its base, and the resulting electricity outage affected 100,000 properties.
Electricity is distributed through a network, and this particular pylon was crucial to the network. The removal of the pylon had a massive impact on the transmission of power between communities.
Things spread through networks
Networks are made up of nodes and links. Electricity networks are easy to imagine, with power stations and substations the nodes, and power lines the links that connect them.
Not all networks are as visible as power grids. For example, we can think of people as nodes in social networks, and their interactions as links between them. Information, ideas and disease travel through these networks as power may flow through an electrical grid.
When we talk about “spread”, we’re looking at how something travels from one node to another across a network. Sometimes we want things to spread through networks with as little difficulty as possible, such as electricity or food. In other cases, we want to prevent things spreading through the network, like disease or extremist ideologies.
In the 21st century, understanding how things spread on networks is vital for the world to thrive. The Covid-19 pandemic made this very clear. Knowing that the virus spread through close contact with infected individuals, governments were able to make policies and give advice on the most effective way to sever networks to prevent spread. Just like that downed power pylon in Northland, removing links prevented spread on the network.
The networks that spread information fundamentally shape our experience of the world
Information is another thing that spreads on networks. This happens over many scales – from talking to your neighbour over the fence, to reading online news from the other side of the world.
Even in our digitally-connected world, information is still closely related to geography. We still prefer to interact with people who share our worldview, which in turn influences where we choose to live and work, and the kind of information that we access – nodes can often choose which links are created which, in turn, influences the nature of future links.
Companies that depend on producing and implementing new knowledge depend on these networks. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley developed around Stanford University and continues to be a hub for the high tech sector. These environments make it easy for information to spread between like-minded people and are often constructed intentionally – as in the case of science parks. In short, the dissemination of information within networks can profoundly affect the design and growth of physical spaces.
Important nodes in information networks that spread information between communities are often referred to as `brokers’ or `structural holes’. These brokers are an important part of how societies reach consensus. One example of brokerage in the context of information spreading is how iwi and other communities are represented in governmental bodies through elected representatives. These people act as bridges between communities and the broader political system, facilitating the flow of information between them. They relay the community’s concerns to the government and bring back key updates, ensuring both sides stay informed and engaged.
The structure of networks affects how things spread
The structure of the network, including how densely connected it is and whether it contains distinct groups or isolated nodes, plays a crucial role in how quickly and widely information spreads. Communities within the network may facilitate rapid sharing within their group but slow the flow to others. Additionally, the strength and frequency of connections between nodes can impact the speed of diffusion – strong, frequent interactions often lead to faster spread, while weak or sporadic ties may slow it down.
Different things can simultaneously spread across a network. This was highlighted during Covid-19 as the spread of disease and information between people interacted in complex ways – such as misinformation influencing behaviour – with tangible effects on the health of people across the world.
Food and values spread like electricity
Thinking in networks shows how different phenomena, both tangible and abstract, spread in remarkably similar ways. The simple example of electricity supply failing due to a fallen pylon can give us insight into seemingly unrelated things, like the distribution of food – or values and beliefs.
The food that we depend on for survival is distributed through a network. This was made starkly clear by the disruption of Covid-19, which restricted the flow of food between food producers and household consumers. Food producers, retailers and restaurants – or, nodes in the network – were affected by unwell workers working at reduced capacity, or closed as non-essential businesses, and the links between these nodes were disrupted.
However, while the usual regular food supply chains were constrained, local communities self-organised to decentralise the network. Alternative food networks were established to get food to people who needed it, through informal and voluntary efforts by communities. That is, new links sprung up organically and at a more local scale to compensate for disruption at the national scale. Communities saw the value in these emergent experiments, which has meant that some of these novel and innovative networks have persisted. This new coexistence of food distribution networks at distinct scales has improved the resilience of aspects of the spread of these vital, and delicious, components of our daily lives.
This example demonstrates how seemingly different things like food and values can spread through networks and interact with each other in unexpected ways. While food moves through a physical network, values hitch a ride and shape the way in which these networks form and persist—the values that led to informal food networks being set up have also helped sustain them, as their success reinforced the underlying beliefs that keep them going.
Qualitatively different but quantitatively similar
Electricity, ideas, values, food, disease – many different things spread across networks. Although they are different in character, these networks often have the same universal underlying architecture, and behave in quantitatively similar ways. This means that by studying networks, we can gain insight into the spread of seemingly very different phenomena.
If a power pylon can fall over and cut power to 100,000 properties, what does this mean for other things that spread across networks?
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Kyle Higham and Emma Sharp, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Saved from extinction? New modelling suggests a hopeful future for te reo Māori
18 September 2024
Written by Te Pūnaha Matatini PhD candidate Michael Miller.
Just four years ago, experts warned te reo Māori was on a “pathway towards extinction” unless resources were put into teaching young Māori.
But a new mathematical model combined with recent data suggests the future of Māori language is not as grim as it once was.
My ongoing research looks at the future trajectory of Māori language acquisition over the next few decades. Based on recent data, my model suggests the Māori language could be on a path to recovery.
For over 50 years, revitalisation efforts have played a significant role in supporting the language’s resurgence.
The progress of te reo Māori provides hope for campaigners working to save the 55% of world languages destined to be dormant, doomed, or extinct by the end of the century.
Rescuing te reo Māori
Māori revitalisation efforts began in earnest in the late 1970s. The first kōhanga reo was opened in 1982, and te reo Māori was made an official language under the Maori Language Act 1987.
Despite these efforts, there have been ongoing concerns about the sustainability of the language. According to the 2018 Census, just 4% of New Zealanders reported they were fluent speakers of te reo Māori, up from 3.7% in 2013.
In the General Social Survey (also based on self-reported data), the number of people able to speak te reo Māori, at least fairly well, increased – from 6.1% in 2018 to 7.9% in 2021.
This was the first time there was a significant increase in this level of te reo Māori proficiency.
In 2019, the Labour government committed to the revitalisation of te reo Māori by setting a national target of one million speakers (at any level of proficiency) by 2040.
Modelling the future
My research is based on several sources of data – including the Census, the General Social Survey and the Te Kupenga survey of Māori wellbeing. The goal is to model how many speakers of te reo Māori we can expect in 20 or 30 years.
To understand this future path, I use my model to create different possible trajectories and compare them to these data sources. After finding the trajectories that best match, I extend these trajectories into the next few decades to estimate how many people might speak te reo in the future.
Some of the data, particularly from the more recent General Social Survey and the number of students learning te reo in schools and at university level, pointed to growth in te reo Māori acquisition. For example, enrolments in tertiary te reo courses have increased by 93% over the past ten years.
According to the model and current data, achieving one million speakers by 2040 is within reach, but it will take an increased commitment from the government and communities to make this future more likely.
Developing policies to help
The next step of the research will be to better understand the role of government policy, iwi and the public in encouraging the adoption of te reo Māori.
Such policies include more te reo Māori in schools, providing more access to university-level te reo courses, encouraging fluent speakers to become teachers, increasing the use of bilingual signs, and promoting the use of te reo Māori at home.
But these are not the sort of policies we can expect from the current government, which has actively discouraged the official use of te reo Māori and is working to reduce incentives for public servants to learn the language.
This year’s Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) also comes amid an ongoing debate around the constitutional role of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi).
There is likely enough momentum within the reo community to keep the language growing in the short term. But if these policy settings were to continue (or worsen) over several years, it could have a negative effect on the future trajectory of te reo.
There are a lot of Indigenous languages being lost at the moment. Research has shown this can cause irrevocable harm for the communities they belong to.
It is important for the wellbeing of Māori that their language and culture are preserved. And it benefits all New Zealanders to have an understanding of one of the foundational languages of the country.
Based on the modelling, the future is looking hopeful in this respect.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Scaling: Relationships across size, space and time
4 September 2024
This is the fourth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
The microbiome is the community of trillions of microorganisms living in, and on, the bodies of complex organisms – like people. In human beings this microbial community aids the digestion of food, supports the immune system, and protects us against pathogens – the infectious microbes that cause sickness and disease.
Do you think of yourself as a walking community of trillions of microorganisms? Probably not. Thinking of ourselves as individuals rather than a collection of microorganisms is an example of how we can classify the world into different scales.
Our knowledge systems tend to order everything into different scales to help us organise and understand our universe. These scales are typically used for convenience as well as having some meaning. It is useful to distinguish the individual from a population of people, just as it is helpful to differentiate days from years when we think of time scales.
The different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed
In complex systems, the concept of scale refers to the different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed. These levels can be thought of as micro, meso and macro. In the example of human beings, the microbiome is at the micro scale, the human individual at meso scale, and the natural and built environment that we inhabit at the macro scale.
These scales are groupings of size, but they are also sets of complex relationships which may be nested within each other. For example, interactions occur between the microbiome, the individual, and the environment. The composition of our microbiome is influenced by the food we eat, our habits and behaviours, which in turn are influenced by the natural and built environments we live in, in turn influencing those microbes themselves, which influences our health.
Understanding relationships between the system scales of the microbiome, the health of a person, and external environments is essential for knowing what to do to improve human health and prevent disease.
From the microscopic to the global, from the quantum to the cosmos
The planet that we live on is made up of interacting systems encompassing differing scales. These scales may be about size, place, organisation or time.
Spatial scales range from microscopic levels, like individual organisms or microhabitats, to broader landscapes and global ecosystems. Our universe ranges from the smallest known quantum scales to the entire cosmos.
Time scales encompass moments, seasons, years, and geological epochs, reflecting the dynamic nature of ecological processes over time from nerve impulses to annual seasonal changes in forests to the rise and fall of the large dinosaurs.
Organisational scales range from genes and individuals to populations, communities, and whole ecosystems.
Relationships between scales
Scales of any type do not have rigid boundaries. They are open systems that can be nested, interact with each other, and bonded by relationships that feed back and lead to emergent properties and adaptation.
A disruption at one scale can cause a cascade of interactions. For example, a pathogenic bacterial infection within a gut microbiome that causes disease is in reality a population of reproducing bacteria all interacting with other communities of viruses, bacteria and microorganisms – as well as the host’s own immune cells, and the non-living material inside the digestive system. The gut is an ecosystem within wider ecosystems.
Improving the health of human populations requires recognising relationships between scales. Even a very specific risk to health – like an infectious disease – has causes and impacts that will span multiple scales from the microscopic to the global. Think of the spreading and harm caused by SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of Covid-19. The resultant pandemic showed that ignoring the ecosystem of relationships around individuals or communities not only reinforces existing patterns of harm, but reproduces harms over time.
Social scales also matter here. At the macro scale, the effectiveness of national health policies depend heavily on how they are implemented at the meso scale of local communities. Local health services that lack sufficient resources or fail to adapt to their local conditions can undermine national policy intentions. We saw this relationship in action through the Covid-19 pandemic where feedback from local Māori, Pacific and other community-led organisations – through advocacy and protest – influenced the national policy approach. This led to a faster reallocation of resources and development of more responsive and locally adapted communication strategies and health service delivery.
To understand our world, we need to look across scales
Understanding scales as systems of complex relationships helps to identify causes of phenomena such as, infectious disease spread, animal behaviour, human health or environmental degradation – but it also provides information about how we can intervene more effectively to create system change through human action that focuses on the relationships that link scales together.
To prepare for, respond to and learn from things like financial crises, natural disasters, systemic challenges to population health, or changes in the research system, we must look across the scales that influence individuals, communities, and all of humanity. This includes the connections between history, the present and the centennial and millennial time spans of collective memory.
To understand our world, we need to look across scales.
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson and Dave Hayman, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Helping the lungs of an ancestor to breathe freely once again
19 August 2024
The sun is setting at Te Mata Hāpuku. The eelers of Ngāi Tahu have been hard at work digging kōawa, drains that stretch across the cobble flats between Te Roto o Wairewa and the ocean. Beside these drains sit pārua, pits dug into the earth waiting to be filled with the annual harvest of tuna, the eels that are the customary fishery for whānau members.
After sunset, the eelers settle in to wait. As the tide rises saltwater percolates through the beach cobbles reaching the kōawa. The smell of this saltwater sends a signal to the tuna in the lake. For them, it’s time to begin a remarkable journey, the tuna heke.
Te Roto o Wairewa is an ICOLL (Intermittently Closing and Opening Lake and Lagoon) on the southern side of Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū, Banks Peninsula. Each summer tuna depart from here on their heke, a migration across the ocean to the Tongan Trench to breed. But like almost all of the coastal lakes around Aotearoa New Zealand, Wairewa is in bad shape, but has been improving in recent years. It is a very shallow lake, averaging only one to three metres in depth. Forest clearance, wetland drainage, pest and weed incursion and intensification of land usage have all degraded the lake and its catchment.
When the shallow waters of Wairewa are warm, stagnant and overly rich in nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from fertiliser runoff or septic tank overflows, cyanobacterial blooms form. These toxic blooms make it unsafe for swimming, and some species can be lethal for local tuna populations – or for anyone who might eat them. A particularly nasty bloom in the early 2000s killed 1,000 eels on the lake.
Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator Dr Matiu Prebble (Ngāti Irakehu, Ngāi Tahu) is a tangata tiaki, one of the caretakers of the lake who issue permits locally to whānau members of Ngāi Tahu who harvest eels from January to April. “It’s difficult to make a decision on whether to go ahead with eeling when there has been a bloom,” he explains. There are three monitoring stations on the lake which the Cawthron Institute and Environment Canterbury use to sample water quality. Researchers at the Cawthron Institute analyse these samples for algal cell counts of cyanobacterial blooms, and if dangerous levels are reached, a warning is sent out through Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand.
“This is quite a delayed approach,” says Matiu. “We don’t get any of the data until a month later showing us what is happening in the lake. So we don’t actually know what this means for the eel fishery on the lake in real time.”
This is where the tools of complex systems can be useful. The appearance of a bloom can be thought of as a tipping point, when the complex system of the lake undergoes an abrupt transition between a clear, healthy state and cloudy, polluted state based on changes in underlying conditions such as phosphorus levels.
Matiu and fellow Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator Associate Professor Graham Donovan have seed funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini to analyse the wealth of monitoring data from the lake from a temporal and spatiotemporal tipping point perspective and develop a predictive model to inform future monitoring, predictions and potential interventions.
Graham has experience modelling bodily organs, and looking at other tipping points – such as asthma attacks in asthmatic lungs. He is interested in early warning signals that can be identified in data from asthmatic lungs that signal an impending asthma attack.
This work resonated with Matiu, as Ngāi Tahu envisage Wairewa as a bodily organ. When Ngāi Tahu ancestor Makō first laid claim to the area, he was very taken by the richness of mahinga kai or traditional foods that were available there, particularly the eels. He laid claim by saying “Taku pane ki utu, aku waewae ki tai,” or “Inland a pillow for my head and on the shores a rest for my feet.”
“Wairewa is the whakatinanatia or embodiment of Makō,” says Matiu. “For the last century, it’s been a poorly functioning organ of his body. At the moment it could be though of as a poorly functioning bladder, but what we really want the lake to be like is a highly functioning organ like a lung.”
“I saw Graham speak about his work on modelling bodily organs, and this approach really resonated with me given how we think about the lake,” says Matiu. “There’s a lot of potential in utilising his complex systems approaches to bodily organs to come up with new ideas about how we can address some of the problems in these lakes.”
Seed funding has created a unique project that could only have originated within Te Pūnaha Matatini. This funding paid for two summer interns to work on the project: Tavake Tohi (Tonga) in Auckland, and Madeleine Barber-Wilson (Ngāti Kahungunu ki te Wairoa, Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana) in Christchurch.
Tavake has a background in geographic information systems, and has been analysing satellite imagery and data from a multispectral drone to explore the spatial dimensions of blooms on the lake. He also has a personal connection to the heke of the eels, as they are also harvested in his village in Tonga at the other end of their migration.
Maddie has simultaneously been analysing years of water monitoring data to understand the lake as a temporal system. “Critical transitions between cloudy, polluted states and clear, healthy states in shallow lakes can be modelled mathematically,” says Maddie, “and our goal is to use a model to find mathematical early warning signals of changes in state for Wairewa. Restoring the health of this lake means protecting a source of mātauranga and kai for iwi and hapū of the rohe. I’m excited to be putting my maths skills to work in the real world and am hoping that the results of our project will be helpful for future kaitiaki of the lake.”
Applying modelling approaches usually used for bodily organs to a lake is pushing the boundaries of complex systems theory and its real-world application. “This project is about both extending complex systems theory, and applying this to the lake as a spatiotemporal system,” says Graham. “We have water sampling data from multiple locations at different times, and visual data from satellites and drones. Where we really want to get to is what we call spatiotemporal early warning signals, looking at how the lake changes in both time and space.”
“The lake is very long and narrow,” continues Graham. “It’s not one dimensional, but it has a very significant length from the headwaters down to the flat, and not much width. So if you can incorporate data from all these sources in a stratified structure, can you get more accurate early warning signals than you could by just looking at the temporal data alone?”
This work is of central importance to the Wairewa community, and has broad engagement from Wairewa Rūnanga, the Birdling’s Flat community, the Christchurch City Council, Environment Canterbury and the Department of Conservation. About 20 years ago, Charisma Rangipunga put forward the wero “ka haha te tuna ki te roto, ka haha te reo ki te kāinga, ka haha te tangata ki te whenua.” If the lake is breathing and full of tuna, and the houses full of language, the people will be well. But if there are no eels or language, the people will suffer.
“If we don’t have our tuna there,” concludes Matiu, “then we might as well pack up and leave, basically.”
Illustrated by Sophie Burgess.