Working as one: A road map to disaster resilience for Australia

Natural disasters cause widespread disruption, costing the Australian economy $6.3 billion per year, and those costs are projected to rise incrementally to $23 billion by 2050.

With more frequent natural disasters with greater consequences, Australian communities need the ability to prepare and plan for them, absorb and recover from them, and adapt more successfully to their effects.

Enhancing Australian resilience will allow us to better anticipate disasters and assist in planning to reduce losses, rather than just waiting for the next king hit and paying for it afterwards.

This report offers a roadmap for enhancing Australia’s disaster resilience, building on the 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience. It includes a snapshot of relevant issues and current resilience efforts in Australia, outlining key challenges and opportunities.

The report sets out 11 recommendations to help guide Australia towards increasing national resilience, from individuals and local communities through to state and federal agencies.

Special Report Issue 49 – Heavy weather: Climate and the Australian Defence Force

The report, authored by Anthony Press, Anthony Bergin, and Eliza Garnsey, argues that the downstream implications of climate change are forcing Defence to become involved in mitigation and response tasks. Defence’s workload here will increase, so we need a new approach.

Heavy Weather makes a number of recommendations including:

  • Defence should work with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency to establish an inter-agency working group on climate change and security. It would focus on addressing climate event scenarios for Australia and the Asia–Pacific  to manage the risks those scenarios pose to national resilience and regional stability.
  • Defence should appoint an adviser to the Chief of the Defence Force on climate issues to develop a Responding to Climate Change Plan that details how Defence will manage the effects of climate change on its operations and infrastructure.
  • Defence should audit its environmental data to determine its relevance for climate scientists and systematically make that data publicly available. It should set up an energy audit team to see where energy efficiencies can be achieved in Defence.
  • Australia should work with like-minded countries in the ‘Five Eyes’ community to share best practice and thinking on how military organisations should best respond to extreme weather events.

The recommendations aren’t about Defence having a ‘green’ view of the world: they’re about the ADF being well placed to deal with the potential disruptive forces of climate change.  

You can watch authors Anthony Bergin and Tony Press discussing this report here and here.

Special Report Issue 17 – The thin green line: Climate change and Australian policing

This report examines the implications of climate change for Australia’s police forces and officers.

The report has a number of recommendations including the creation of an information hub and the development of risk assessments of the locations that will be most affected by climate change as part of a multi-agency strategic approach to climate change adaptation.