Wendy Saunders is a Principal Advisor – Risk Reduction and “Champion of Land Use Planning” at the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake, based in Wellington. She works across natural hazard risk reduction, resilience, and planning, with a strong focus on improving land-use planning decision-making.

Wendy has extensive experience bridging science, policy, and practice to support more transparent, practical, and risk-informed approaches to managing natural hazards. Her work includes presenting submissions on Bills to Select Committees, contributing to council plan changes, applying hazard science to inform scenarios and evidence-based submissions, and supporting the development of risk tolerance and pre-event recovery guidance. She also guest lectures on natural hazard planning and supervises PhD students.

Before joining the Natural Hazards Commission six years ago, Wendy spent 16 years at GNS Science in the social science team, where she led research programmes supporting councils, communities, and iwi to understand and implement risk-based land-use planning across a range of natural hazards.

Wendy completed her PhD in risk-based land-use planning in 2012. That same year, she was a World Social Science Fellow and received the New Zealand Planning Institute Graduate Award for her PhD. Her risk-based planning approach has been adopted in many council policies, including the Bay of Plenty Regional Council Regional Policy Statement, which received the NZPI Best Practice Award in 2017 for their natural hazards chapter. In 2018, she was recognised as an emerging early career researcher at the Science New Zealand Awards.

Following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, Wendy led the all-of-government response to the natural hazards chapter of the replacement Christchurch District Plan. In 2022, she was seconded to the Ministry for the Environment for 18 months, where she contributed to the development of the now-repealed Spatial Planning Act and Built Environment Act, as well as the (since superseded) National Policy Statement for Natural Hazards Decision-Making.