Climate change challenges how policy agents imagine and manage risks in space and time. The impacts are dynamic, uncertain and contested. We use riskscapes as a lens to analyse how New Zealand has perceived and mediated natural hazard and climate risks over time. We identify five different national riskscapes using a historical timeline, which have changed as global risks cascade into national and sub-national governance. We find that while there has been a major effort to reflect the dynamic and systemic language of risk theory in national policy, a significant challenge remains to develop appropriate governance and implementation strategies and to shift from long-held ways of doing and knowing.