Our role

EQC Toka Tū Ake aims to reduce the impact on people and property when natural disasters occur, by protecting homeowners and helping them recover from natural hazard events.

We do this by providing the first layer of residential land and building insurance cover for a range of natural hazards, and through careful administration of the Natural Disaster Fund.

We want to ensure New Zealanders have access to affordable natural disaster insurance, and that communities continue to increase their resilience to natural disasters.

To help increase resilience, we also fund research, and promote education and awareness aimed at preventing or minimising the impacts of natural hazard events.

How we carry out our role

EQC Toka Tū Ake is a Crown Entity, created through the Earthquake Commission Act 1993 (EQC Act). The Crown Entities Act 2004 establishes the way we work, while the EQC Act sets out our roles and functions.

Our core roles:

Provide natural disaster insurance for residential property (residential homes and limited areas of land). Read more about EQCover.
Administer the Natural Disaster Fund, including its investments and reinsurance.
Fund research and education on natural disasters and ways of reducing their impact.

The EQC scheme has existed in one form or another since 1945 as a way to help manage the financial impact of significant natural disaster events on New Zealand communities.

Over the years, the scheme has evolved to meet the changing needs of New Zealanders, advances in technology and our understanding of the risks and hazards that we cover.

We have identified four key areas in which we operate and these are used to measure and report on our performance:

recovery
resilience
risk financing
readiness.

You can read more about our strategic objectives, outputs and outcomes in our Statement of Intent.

Our role following a natural disaster

Although EQC Toka Tū Ake is not a first responder, we have an important role to play in responding to a natural hazard event and supporting community recovery.

Insurance support for impacted homeowners is a critical part of a community’s recovery. We work closely with our insurance partners, central and local government, and the emergency management sector to ensure we can rapidly build an understanding of the scale of damage, and the vulnerabilities and needs of communities after an event, so we’re able to provide a co-ordinated recovery effort.

Information-gathering is critical to this, and we use loss modelling, field reconnaissance, claims data, and data from GeoNet and other science monitoring to gather and share critical information that helps to inform the response planning.