New Zealand Science Review

In this article I describe the state of understanding at the end of the Deep South National Science Challenge concerning how tropical cyclones - TCs, such as 2023's Gabrielle - may change in the future. TCs are some of the most destructive weather systems on Earth, and understanding how they may change in the future is of enormous societal and economic concern. A state-of-the-art climate model is used, forced with several future climate scenarios to study TCs affecting the New Zealand region. UKESM1 is a coupled atmosphere-ocean earth system model and the TCs predicted by it are found using offline software which tracks the position of simulated pressure lows through time. The software used is validated against the tracks of cyclones from 1968 [Giselle] and 2023 [Gabrielle] as well as a different cyclone tracking software package. The power dissipation index, PDI, gives a first order measure of TC strength and it is found that the average PDI per storm increases with top-of atmosphere radiative forcing by up to 24% under a `fossil-fuelled development' scenario, SSP5-8.5. I conclude with a discussion on New Zealand's future research landscape.

Jonny Williams

Science interrupted: Tropical cyclone forecasting developments in the Deep South National Science Challenge

科学受阻：热带气旋预报在“深南国家科学挑战”中的发展

Independent, well-informed experts from academia largely serve as bastions of evidence-based social and scientific commentary, ensuring integrity and accuracy amidst the deluge of false narratives. However, although it is enshrined in the legislature that universities should act as a critic and conscience of Aotearoa New Zealand, this role provides limited financial benefits to the university's bottom line. As financial drivers have become more influential in determining what is taught and how staff spend their time, this public good, which has always been on the periphery of staff tasks, is slowly disappearing. As an example, academics at Massey University have previously been active and vocal researchers, educators, and critics of the state of freshwater in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, Professor Russell Death and Dr Mike Joy, who have led the freshwater ecology team, have now both been pressured to leave, so in 2024, Massey University will no longer teach any courses in freshwater ecology. Neither of us was made redundant or directly asked to leave, but the constantly shifting teaching pressures and altered managerial priorities have left us both at Massey without time and/or support to continue our community outreach and public engagement. We will provide examples of the difficulty of being a critic and conscience at a university where the financial bottom line is the key imperative. Unfortunately, the dwindling number of freshwater ecology graduates being trained and the lack of critical commentary on Aotearoa New Zealand's freshwater crisis may go largely unnoticed. We believe the current university crisis will exacerbate the loss of this essential public good, with few people even aware of what has been lost.

Russell Death

Mike Joy

Silencing Universities by Stealth: An Invisible Consequence of our University Crisis

悄然压制大学：我们大学危机的一个无形后果

Michael Hendy

Mathematics in evolution

进化中的数学

Mike Berridge

Allen Petrey

Editorial

社论

David Penny

Charles Darwin as a scientist

查尔斯·达尔文作为科学家

In 2005 the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission’s (TEC) put out a call for academic feedback on their Strategic Review of the Tertiary Education Workforce. Authors on this review provided a comprehensive review of the increasing reliance of tertiary institutes, particularly universities, on fixed-term contract staff, and the inherent risks for New Zealand science of relying on staff with unstable career structures and funding support. We explored some of the causes behind the transformation of the workforce from permanent to fixed-term, and recommended a suite of potential pathways to help address the challenges. This current review reports that nearly 20 years on very little has changed, and indeed the situation has gotten worse, with more researchers than ever before now on fixed-term contracts, even at senior levels. We have failed to establish and fund a career fellowship system. There has been a lack of substantive increases in funding for grants like Marsden and HRC that can sustain employment of research staff, and grant funding has not kept up with inflation. The net result is that we have essentially created a gig economy for research staff, with reliance on repeated contracts over many years, with few if any opportunities to transition to permanent positions. Researchers must write more and more grants to sustain their salaries as grants are insufficiently funded due to lack of investment leaving staff with either reducing the contract time or without a full salary for the full duration. Low funding rates due to lack of investment make it increasingly difficult to get funding to pay their salaries. Researchers see a bleak future, and the brain drain has begun. Students do not see a career in research as attractive and thus our capacity to develop the next generation of Kiwi scientists is at risk. This crisis threatens our ability to undertake and deliver science, technology and innovation that is essential for the growth of our economy. Urgent action is needed to address this fundamentally flawed approach to how we fund university based research and how we fail to support sustainable research careers.

Laura Bennet

Rebecca Campbell

Alistair Gunn

Devolution of New Zealand Research to a Gig Economy

新西兰研究向零工经济的演变

This article summarises the events that led to the dismantling of the school of Natural and Computational Sciences at Massey University, Albany campus, and the unsuccessful attempts to prevent it by staff, the public and the New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS). Although challenging to prove, we argue that the dismantling was unnecessary, senseless and counterproductive. The unsuccessful attempts to save an academically and financially viable school exposed a weakness in the current Education and Training Act and demonstrated why New Zealand (NZ) needs an independent entity that could investigate universities, guard the national interests, ensure accountability of tertiary institutions’ administration, and protect the academic freedom of individual academics.

Alona Ben-Tal

Troy Baisden

The destruction of Sciences at Massey University and why we need an independent entity that can investigate universities

梅西大学科学学科的毁灭及其原因，以及为何我们需要一个独立的机构来调查大学

The New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS) sought information from all eight New Zealand (NZ) universities via Official Information Act (OIA) requests. The requests were for academic staff numbers on 1st May 2019 and 1st May 2023, capturing data before and after Covid-19 lockdowns. We requested numbers for permanent, fixed-term and casual academic staff for each faculty onthose dates with a breakdown of men, women and gender unknown/diverse. The aim was to look for impacts over this period on staff numbers in the sciences and how staff in different types of employment and gender were affected, but we also compared this data to other subject areas taught and researched at NZ universities. Since May 2023 there have been several additional tranches of layoffs at multiple universities which will not be captured in the data we present here. However, while it is arguable whether these new layoffs are due to the impacts of the COVID19 pandemic and subsequent global financial turmoil, we can see that certain subject areas ofacademia have already felt the effects in May 2023. Health faculties fared the best over the period, which might reflect the need for health research and development of the health workforce during a global pandemic. However, these gains were accompanied by large losses in humanities, education, and arts, as well as other subject areas such as fundamental sciences and engineering.

Kate Lee

The impact on NZ university academic staffing over the pandemic years

疫情对新西兰大学学术人员配置的影响

Publication Information	Publisher: Victoria University of Wellington Library，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: ，Proportion of original research papers: ，Self Citation Rate:， Gold OA Rate:

New Zealand Science Review

Journal Citation Format

A journal article with 1 author

A journal article with 2 authors

A journal article with 3 authors

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Books Citation Format

Thesis Citation Format

Web sites Citation Format

Patent Citation Format

Staying up late manually editing references? ivySCI automatically matches journals and helps you generate references with a single click.

Share Submission Experience

Science interrupted: Tropical cyclone forecasting developments in the Deep South National Science Challenge

Silencing Universities by Stealth: An Invisible Consequence of our University Crisis

Mathematics in evolution

Editorial

Charles Darwin as a scientist

Silencing Universities by Stealth: An Invisible Consequence of our University Crisis

Science interrupted: Tropical cyclone forecasting developments in the Deep South National Science Challenge

Devolution of New Zealand Research to a Gig Economy

The destruction of Sciences at Massey University and why we need an independent entity that can investigate universities

The impact on NZ university academic staffing over the pandemic years