What We Do

Our M.E Research team, who work across both research and consulting spheres, are uniquely positioned to contribute along the full progression of societal decision-making and problem solving. Our highly skilled team draws on a range of contemporary analytical and evaluation tools to support councils, government agencies and our private sector clients.

Ecological, environmental and wellbeing economics

Our team has specialist skills in the assessment of the economy-environment interface. Our projects range from resource use and emissions accounting, analysis of ecosystem service appropriation, through to studies on the interrelationships between earth’s biogeochemical cycles and the global economy. The Ecological Footprint is one example of an indicator that has been developed by our team to characterise human-environment interactions at a variety of local and national scales, both for New Zealand and for France. We have also supported councils and other stakeholders right across New Zealand in the analysis of the economic implications of options for freshwater management.

Our team also has an expanding interest and expertise in the multi-dimensional concept of well-being. Hence, well-being indicators and evaluation methods such as extended cost benefit analysis, genuine progress indicators and full cost accounting are also part of the team’s core research agenda.

Infrastructure planning and resilience research

Our team has developed expertise and innovative tools to measure, model and analyse the economic and wider consequences of infrastructure failures, natural hazards and other similar disruptions, across space and time, for multiple stakeholders. Along with our collaborative research partners, we are key developers of the Measuring the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure Tool (or MERIT). MERIT is a state-of-the art economic simulation model that tracks behaviour adaptation and transition pathways. Its uses have included supporting resilient infrastructure investment planning in Wellington and providing information to the Government Enquiry into Auckland’s fuel outage.

Our team is heavily involved in resilience research currently underway throughout New Zealand, both directly and through PhD supervision. Director, Garry McDonald, co-leads both the Multi-Hazard Risk Model programme within the Resilience National Science Challenge and the Endeavour programme ‘Transitioning Taranaki to a Volcanic Future’. Team members are also involved in earthquake resilience research through QuakeCoRE, research into climate-induced hazards (e.g. wildfires), and modelling work to support the government’s Covid19 response.

Complex systems modelling and analysis

We draw on a wide range of tools and techniques for modelling complex systems to support our research and consulting projects. Our team has extensive expertise in economy-wide modelling using input-output, optimisation/general equilibrium and dynamic simulation (e.g. agent-based, system dynamics) approaches. Input-output principles have also been used to link economic systems with ecological systems, for example tracking industrial resource appropriation and emissions. We further draw on system dynamics to engage stakeholders in the process of knowledge creation, model behaviour adaptations, and capture complex feedbacks happening within systems over time.

Our highly analytical team also has expertise in graph theory, statistics and data science (e.g. machine/deep learning) methods. We increasingly draw on evaluation approaches that not only use the most-up-to-date and sophisticated analytical techniques, but also focus on recognising and communicating uncertainty to decision makers.