What can I do in response to the Fuel Supply Crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand?
When the Trucks Stop - A community mutual aid guide for fuel-constrained New Zealand - open for your input!
At the time of writing, New Zealand has roughly 20 to 27 days of physical onshore fuel stocks. We import 100% of our refined fuel. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has already triggered Force Majeure declarations from Gulf and Asian suppliers, and the late March escalation has destroyed refining infrastructure that will take years to rebuild, if it is rebuilt at all.
Government will do what government does: triage. Hospitals, police, essential freight corridors. That is appropriate. But it means communities are largely on their own for everything else - food distribution, transport, heating, health access, economic survival. Civil Defence is built for earthquakes and floods, not for a slow-onset nationwide supply chain collapse with no clear end date.
So we wrote a guide.
When the Trucks Stop: Mutual Aid Arrangements for a Fuel-Constrained New Zealand is a practical briefing covering ten areas where communities can organise now to meet basic needs if fuel imports fall to zero or near-zero for weeks or months. It covers food production and distribution, water, energy, transport, health, economic alternatives like timebanking and local currencies, communication, governance, and the specific needs of vulnerable populations.
Image Credit: The-Power-of-Mutual-Aid-Networks.jpg (700×394)
It is not theory. It draws on real precedents - Cuba’s Special Period, the Lyttelton TimeBank after the Christchurch earthquake, Puerto Rico’s community microgrids after Hurricane Maria, Ukraine’s rapid urban farming response. These are places where people faced severe fuel or supply disruption and found ways through it. Not comfortably. Not without suffering. But they made it work, and the common thread in every case was community-level organisation that was already in place, or was built fast, before the worst hit.
The document plans for the worst case whilst hoping for a better outcome. The arrangements it describes cost almost nothing to establish and strengthen communities regardless of whether severe disruption eventuates. If it does, they could prove decisive.
This is a living document and we want your input. The Google Doc version is open for comments. If you know of resources, models, organisations, or practical experience that should be included, please add a comment or get in touch. We will edit contributions into the guide as they come in. This is a community document for community use. It is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence - share it, adapt it, translate it, print it out and pin it to the noticeboard at your local dairy.
What you can do this week:
Read the guide
Share it with your community group, church, marae, sports club, school community, or neighbourhood
Call a meeting - even five people is enough
Contact a local farmer and ask if they’d supply your community directly in a crisis
Set up a communication channel - a group chat, a phone tree, a physical noticeboard
Comment on the doc with resources, corrections, or experience we should include
The time for preparation is before you need it. That time is now.
Wise Response Society March 2026
Did you read my mind? In the last 24 hours, I literally thought "Our community needs to organise". And at Jack Reacher quote sprang to mind : "prepare for the worst, hope for the best".
Thank you for your post!
Thanks Nathan and the Wise Response team for all the upfront work. Here's my email lastnight to local Council leaders here in the Bay of Islands.
Tēnā koutou
This email is a direct request that the Strait of Hormuz crisis should be treated as the dominant issue facing both the NRC and FNDC, and that Council agendas should be cleared to focus on response planning for an emergency due to fuel shortages.
The evidence base for that request is set out in the material presented here - https://energyandresilience.substack.com/p/letter-to-environment-southland-re?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=yn9sg - by Nathan Surendran, a friend and Chairperson of the national collective Wise Response, in his communication to Environment Southland on 17 March.
Key points:
- NZ has a near-total reliance on imported refined fuels and long, vulnerable supply chains reliant on shipping and air transport,
- Asian refineries our fuels are sourced from are heavily reliant on middle east crude oil supplies
the current situation is far more severe than Zealand’s biggest energy shock of 1973,
experts estimate the current shock, in terms of global fuel production, is approximately 100 times greater in relative impact than the crises of the 1970s and 1980s, with the conflict having taken out 20% of the global oil supply,
- as of March 20 New Zealand has only 6-7 weeks of fuel in country and on the water with the "last" shipment scheduled to arrive on March 30,
- the crisis has also significantly impacted global supplies of LNG (30% of the global supply), fertiliser feedstocks, food exports, helium critical to the electronics industry and other critical commodities,
- the modern NZ economy is effectively a “diesel engine” largely reliant on road transport for the movement of critical supplies and commodities, and most importantly the just in time food distribution system. If the fuel stops, the engine seizes,
- as the situation continues to deteriorate in the middle east fuel supply shortages become more inevitable every day,
- fuel prices continue to rise rapidly, impacting all household spending and putting extreme pressure on the ability of Northlanders to cover the costs of living,
- Councils should plan on the basis that significant fuel supply constraints will persist for at least six months, and possibly longer.
Who am I?
I am a resident of rural Kawakawa. My career has been in the Council and Corporate sustainability fields having held senior roles in this space at Fulton Hogan and Fletcher Construction. I am well connected in the corporate sustainability field and with members of Wise Response.
What I am seeking.
Government will do what government does: triage hospitals, police, essential freight corridors etc. That is appropriate. But it means communities are largely on their own for everything else - food distribution, transport, heating, health access, economic survival. Civil Defence is built for earthquakes and floods, not for a slow-onset nationwide supply chain collapse with no clear end date. In keeping with Nathan's correspondence to Environment Southland I request the following:
1. Convene an extraordinary meeting of the Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management Co-ordinating Executive Group (CEG) to assess Northland’s fuel supply position, including an inventory of council-held fuel stocks across all four Northland councils and generator capacity at critical facilities,
2. Request that fuel distributors operating in Northland provide current stock and resupply projections. Any refusal to provide this information citing commercial sensitivity should be considered untenable in the interests of community resilience,
3. A key priority should be the integration of food security into emergency response planning. Northland’s food production system is fuel-dependent at every stage: fertiliser application, harvesting, processing, refrigeration, transport distribution. A six-month fuel shortage is also a food system emergency. Council's should be coordinating with key food system players including agricultural and horticultural producers, companies and industry groups to understand their minimum fuel requirements and contingency plans.
4. Activate community response plan networks now, before a formal emergency declaration. The community response plans developed for CDEM events include the identification of vulnerable people, key resources, and contact trees. Those same networks are relevant for fuel rationing. Wise Response has developed an excellent open source guide When the Trucks Stop: Mutual Aid Arrangements for a Fuel-Constrained New Zealand - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S2sWsBXqtwgkP-AGDtp-PsMRALIXtAOBXi2D6RouS6w/edit?usp=sharing. It's a practical briefing covering ten areas where communities can organise now to meet basic needs if fuel imports fall to zero or near-zero for weeks or months. It covers food production and distribution, water, energy, transport, health, economic alternatives like timebanking and local currencies, communication, governance, and the specific needs of vulnerable populations.
5. NRC and FNDC to formally advocate for the government to investigate a fair and equitable energy rationing system such as Tradable Energy Quotas. TEQs are an electronic energy allocation system where every adult receives a free, weekly fuel entitlement, but can legally buy and sell that entitlement on an open national market. Those who use less than their entitlement sell surplus units and earn money, while those who need more eg freight operators, buy additional units on the market. See the Wise Response white paper on TEQs How New Zealand Could Build a Fair Rationing System in Eight Weeks - https://wiseresponse.substack.com/p/how-new-zealand-could-build-a-fair?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I request a written response indicating what steps NRC and FNDC intend to take regarding:
1. Northland’s Civil Defence Emergency Management Group readiness for a prolonged fuel supply disruption.
2. The categorisation of Council's own fuel-dependent operations.
3. Whether Council will formally advocate for the government to investigate Tradable Energy Quotas.
I am available for further discussion on this matter. As a Northland local I obviously have a keen interest in ensuring my community is prepared to deal with this rapidly developing situation proactively and to the best of our abilities.
As the saying goes. It's wise to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, however hope unfortunately is not a strategy.
Ngā mihi nui
Campbell Sturrock