Tag Archive for: disaster resilience

Australia’s disaster response should build resilience

When ASPI’s Cyclone Tracy: 50 Years On was published last year, it wasn’t just a historical reflection; it was a warning. Just months later, we are already watching history repeat itself.

We need to bake resilience into infrastructure, supply chains and communities, ensuring they are prepared for the next disaster, not just rebuilt to fail again.

This requires: a long-term effort to disaster-proof communities; cross-industry collaboration to strengthen supply chains; and a national resilience strategy.

In 1974, Cyclone Tracy forced Australia to rethink disaster preparedness. But in the five decades since, we’ve seen flood after cyclone after fire.

The February 2025 floods across northern Queensland—from Cairns to Townsville—once again exposed the region’s vulnerabilities.

Communities in Ingham and Cardwell faced widespread devastation. For two weeks, road networks were severed, triggering food shortages and economic disruption. In Cairns, homes that had only just been repaired after Cyclone Jasper were inundated again, highlighting the compounding effect of disasters. Townsville, while spared the catastrophic flooding seen in 2019, remains at risk and may not be as fortunate next time.

In response, the federal government has committed $84 million to strengthen disaster resilience in northern Queensland—a necessary but vastly insufficient sum.

The cost of inaction is rising rapidly, not only in infrastructure damage but in the long-term economic and social stability of the region.

The weaknesses seen during the February floods were not new. Essential supply chains were crippled as roads disappeared under floodwaters. The housing crisis worsened as displaced families were left scrambling for shelter in an already overstretched market. Small businesses, the backbone of regional economies, were once again left picking up the pieces.

And yet, the response remains the same: mop up, rebuild, repeat.

Communities need immediate disaster relief. But real resilience isn’t about recovery—it’s about making sure the same destruction doesn’t happen again.

That means disaster-proofing communities by:

—Retrofitting homes in high-risk areas with stronger materials and flood-resistant designs;

—Updating building codes for future-proofed development;

—Reinstating and expanding the Resilient Homes Fund to cover cyclone- and flood-prone regions;

—Reviewing the insurance system so unaffordable premiums don’t leave people uninsured; and

—Investing in community-led preparedness, building resilience with local knowledge and digital tools.

While much of the focus remains on housing and road repairs, supply chain resilience continues to be overlooked. When floods cut off road transport, food shortages quickly followed. The conversation remained reactive, surfacing only after supply lines had already collapsed. There was no plan to use alternative routes.

Collaboration across industries can strengthen supply chains and critical infrastructure. It should include review processes after disasters.

Australia’s national logistics framework must embed resilience into infrastructure planning. Maritime transport, for example, could have played a much stronger role in maintaining essential goods distribution. But without a contingency plan, there was no mechanism to pivot away from road transport.

Australia needs a national resilience strategy to consider ways to bolster northern infrastructure, supply chains and communities.

The strategy should consider alternative freight corridors to reduce reliance on flood-prone roads. This could include pre-established plans for emergency supply distribution via maritime transport and would require strengthening port infrastructure.

Beyond supply chains, emergency infrastructure must also be adaptable. For example, the temporary single-lane bridge built by the Australian Army over Ollera Creek restored access between Townsville and Ingham, but was unsuitable for heavy vehicles.

A national resilience strategy should also consider strategically positioning maritime assets. Historically, HMAS Cairns has supported various naval vessels, including landing craft. Given the region’s vulnerability to cyclones and flooding, relocating both light and heavy landing craft to Cairns would enable faster disaster response across the region. HMAS Cairns is already well-equipped to support and service these vessels.

This isn’t just a northern Queensland problem; it’s a national crisis. The Colvin Review found that 87 percent of Commonwealth disaster funding is spent on recovery, while the economic cost of disasters is projected to reach $40.3 billion annually by FY2050. The Insurance Council of Australia advised that redirecting funds from the 9 percent stamp duty on insurance premiums to resilience measures could save $6.3 billion by 2050. Yet, funding remains locked in a reactive cycle—fixing damage rather than preventing it.

As we head into a federal election, there’s a risk that disaster resilience becomes just another political football—but it shouldn’t be. The escalating costs of disasters affect all Australians, regardless of who is in power.

Fifty years ago, Cyclone Tracy forced Australia to rethink how it built cities, leading to sweeping reforms in building codes and urban planning. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli has repeatedly stated a commitment to ‘building back better’. It’s time to turn those words into action.

La La Land under siege

The devastating wildfires in California have turned the City of Stars into a scene from an apocalyptic Hollywood movie.

It’s hard to fathom that a disaster of this magnitude could strike a major coastal city today, and difficult to understand how we’re still seeing widespread destruction of homes and businesses. About 12,000 structures have been lost since the fires began on 7 January, with many more likely to follow.

Like Los Angeles, Australia’s capital cities are close to national parks and are vulnerable to bushfires. In 2003 a massive fire hit Canberra. Almost 500 houses burned down, but the city lost no critical infrastructure.

Whether that was thanks to good luck or good preparations, we need to look again at protection of major cities’ critical infrastructure against increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters.

Amid the devastation in LA, some buildings remain unscathed. These structures show the importance of preparedness and attention to disaster-resistant design and resilient building materials.

Two particular examples of resilient building design and materials that have been making headlines worldwide are in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. Buildings there incorporate a range of wildfire-proofing measures, including fire-resistant roof materials and absence of eaves and roof vents.

Internal features include tempered glass and class-A wood, which is as ignition resistant as concrete or steel. The structures also have walls that resist flame and heat for up to one hour. Externally, sparse desert-style landscaping and concrete retaining walls provide effective setbacks.

Meanwhile, the Paul Getty Museum is an example of resilient infrastructure. It sits on a ridgeline in the Santa Monica Mountains and has withstood several wildfires, with this month’s Palisades fire coming within 1.8 metres of the eastern walls. Completed in 1997, the museum features fire-resistant landscapes, materials and systems, including a network of underground pipes connects to a one-million-gallon water tank for emergency sprinkler activation.

Built to the highest fire-resistive standards, it has exterior features including 300,000 travertine stone blocks, and roofs covered in crushed stone. Interior walls are concrete, and the building’s self-contained design includes air pressure systems to separate different areas and prevent smoke infiltration.

So far, the LA wildfires have destroyed an area of about 60 square miles (approximately 16,000 hectares), an area larger than the city of Darwin. In comparison, the Australian 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires burnt more than 16 million hectares of land, resulting in a loss of about 5900 buildings and an estimated insurance loss of $1.34 billion. The economic, social and environmental impacts are still felt.

Reinsurers in Los Angeles have indicated that they will face significant losses and will seek to recover their costs. This will have affect insurance premiums globally, and any may result in rising insurance costs and difficulties in securing coverage. According to climate-change risk analysis modelling, one in 10 properties in Australia will be uninsurable within the next decade. Meanwhile, Australia is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, where insurance is increasingly seen as a luxury expense and is often deprioritised in favour of essential needs such as housing and groceries.

As insurance becomes unaffordable, the government should shoulder the burden of protecting infrastructure. This raises an important question: how well-prepared are our major cities’ critical and social infrastructure to withstand and respond to the increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters that climate change is driving?

50 years ago, Cyclone Tracy was, at the time, the worst natural disaster in Australian history. As reflected in ASPI’s special report Cyclone Tracy: 50 years on, the disaster played a pivotal role in the development of the National Construction Code, which established a standard to enhance resilience against natural hazards such as bushfires, floods and earthquakes. It wasn’t until 1991 that an Australian standard was set for improving the fire resistance of homes in bushfire-prone regions.

The LA wildfires have shown that natural disasters do not respect boundaries set by urban planning. Many of our major cities, including major Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, are bordered by big national parks, making the urban edges highly vulnerable to bushfires, especially as climate change makes conditions hotter and drier.

A reform of the National Construction Code and Australian fire resistance standards are needed to ensure new infrastructure can withstand major weather events. This could be similar to the implementation of sustainability and energy-efficiency standards for new buildings. Governments at all levels can lead by example by improving the disaster resilience of their own assets.

Implementation of a government-led rebate system, similar to the Australia’s solar rebate system, is an example of how government can help offset the costs of adapting existing structures to make them more resilient.

In the short term such a reform would not only reduce the loss of structures during natural disasters; it would also cut building-lifetime energy costs. Over the long term, it would help lower the cost of insurance premiums and, importantly, reduce post-disaster recovery time.

The LA wildfires have underscored the urgent need for governments to rethink their assumptions about bushfire risk and infrastructure resilience. LA is facing a long road ahead to rebuild its infrastructure and restore essential services. Australia must take steps to avoid experiencing a similar crisis.

LA fires: changing climate demands constant and focused preparation

The fires in Los Angeles are estimated to be the most expensive disaster in US history at US$250–275 billion, or 24 to 26 percent of Australia’s annual GDP. That loss has accrued in just over a week and is rising.

This was not a natural disaster. That would imply a lack of human responsibility. Rather, this is what happens when a human-warmed climate catches us off-guard—even in a city that knows fire.

Australia has done significant work since the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, and the floods that followed, to appreciate climate risks and prepare for them. However, much of that work, including the National Climate Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Plan, is yet to be released. As the federal election nears, all parties should remind themselves to not treat climate as a political football—a priority only when disasters strike or when it’s convenient.

These events will continue to surprise if we fail to understand and address the locked-in disaster risks, and they will occur at greater frequency and cause greater loss if we continue warming the atmosphere.

While climate change isn’t the only factor in play in LA, it’s a big part of why officials were taken by surprise. Compound climate-amplified disasters build quietly but strike swiftly. In this case climate appears to have primed the intensity of the fires.

California is no stranger to whiplashing climate conditions. It experienced a three-year drought from 2020 to 2022, followed by two years of significant rainfall—recording LA’s seventh-wettest year in 2022–23. That rainfall drove vegetation growth, then a sustained drought and higher than average temperatures at the start of the current winter dried much of that new vegetation.

The Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames with hot, dry air are typical for the area in winter but were particularly strong with gusts at nearly 160km/h last week—at times grounding firefighting aircraft when they were needed most, pushing fires faster down hillsides where they’d normally slow, and spewing embers far beyond firelines. The winds may have been strengthened by warmer than average ocean temperatures and a meandering North American jet stream, which has been increasingly disrupted by climate change in recent years and may have also contributed to the atmospheric rivers dumping rain over LA in the years before the fires.

Yet those factors alone don’t explain why the fires started, why they’ve been hard to control, or why they’ve caused such damage.

Clear answers on the origins of the fires will come once investigations conclude. Speculating now doesn’t help. Misinformation abounds online, as it increasingly does after disasters, with harmful effects on responders, confusing the response and muddying the analysis needed for future preparation. For example, conspiracy theories hold that the US government used weather control to intensify Hurricane Helene—which struck the southeast United States in September last year—to cause widespread damage. That led to Federal Emergency Management Agency responders facing armed threats.

The Eaton fire, the second-largest in LA, may have been sparked by damaged electrical infrastructure from powerful Santa Ana winds, as has happened in the past. If that’s the case, it adds more pressure to California’s ongoing efforts to prepare its infrastructure for intensifying natural disasters.

Preparation has been underway for some time, but risks remain—in part because there are no cheap solutions. By California’s own estimates, burying all distribution and transmission lines in the state could cost US$763 billion—roughly 70 percent of Australia’s 2024 GDP—and would take years. Nonetheless, the economics of such climate adaptation has become clearer since just a single week of fire has reached a third of that cost.

Urban development has also played a role. Malibu and the surrounding area are traditional fire country—the chaparral vegetation evolved to undergo periods of fire. But there are now eight million people living in fire-prone areas in southern California. Fire-resilient building designs as well as fuel reduction and landscaping around houses might have slowed the growth of the fires in urban environments, protecting more homes. There is no easy way to get around the consequences of building and living in high risk areas; all we can do is try to avoid it in future.

Even though many affected communities are aware of climate and fire risk, they clearly didn’t believe they were vulnerable. Rebuilding with fire resilience in mind will be necessary, especially as fire insurance will become unaffordable for many.

While much focus has been on insufficient water supplies to fight the fires, most reservoirs were full—contradicting misinformation that California’s environmental planning restricted access to upstream sources.

A more plausible explanation for California’s underpreparedness is that urban water infrastructure simply isn’t designed for wildfire.

The Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where many celebrities lost their homes, is at the end of the local water line, so receives less water pressure. As hydrants were tapped for water, the pressure dropped, draining emergency tanks in the neighbourhood.

An investigation will assess the reasons for, and effect of, the ongoing closure of the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades area—hopefully including why it wasn’t rapidly brought back online late in 2024 as climate conditions worsened.

That brings us to the funding, staffing and preparation of LA’s fire authorities. Attention focused on the mayor’s budget reductions, but they were only a 2 percent cut from last year. While that may have had an effect, clearly the scale of the need was far beyond a few percentage points.

Inadequate staffing was a pressure early on, even with 9000 firefighters in LA County alone.

That isn’t a cheap solve, either. If LA needs greater capacity on hand at any time, its budget would have to grow significantly. That demand would have to compete with resources needed to prepare for and reduce the risk of future fires, including potential private firefighting capacities. Again, early investment in preparedness will reduce the complications in and need for future reactive responses. But building out future response capacity will take time.

The bottom line is that LA’s various failures in preparation means it was caught off-guard, but this disaster wouldn’t have been so extreme without climate disruption priming such an intense and unexpected set of fires.

The same dynamic has occurred in Australia, and it will continue if we don’t take climate risks seriously. These events are no longer surprising; they’re sad, they’re painful, but also entirely predictable.

Lessons from Cyclone Tracy: preparing for a future of cascading disasters

On Christmas morning in 1974, Cyclone Tracy unleashed catastrophic destruction on Darwin, forever altering the city and Australia’s approach to disaster resilience. As the intensity of climate-driven catastrophes grows, the main lesson of Cyclone Tracy is clear: we must do more to prepare, and we must do it now.

With wind speeds surpassing 217 km/h, the Category 4 cyclone killed 66 people and injured hundreds. It obliterated more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, displacing most of its population. Fifty years on, the lessons from Cyclone Tracy remain as urgent and relevant as ever, as Australia confronts a new era of escalating climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

ASPI’s new report commemorating Cyclone Tracy’s anniversary highlights the need for proactive, comprehensive disaster resilience in the face of rising climate risks. The aftermath of Tracy revealed deep vulnerabilities in Australia’s preparedness, from inadequate building codes to insufficient community awareness. This reshaped our approach to disaster management, laying the foundations for national disaster-response frameworks that continue to guide Australia.

The immediate aftermath of Cyclone Tracy brought Australia together in a way that was unprecedented in peacetime. The Australian Defence Force led a coordinated relief effort, showcasing the power of military, government and civilian agencies working in unison. The cyclone also prompted establishment of the Darwin Reconstruction Authority, a centralised body that drove the city’s rebuilding efforts and set a benchmark for future disaster recovery initiatives. These responses proved that a structured, collaborative approach to recovery can lead to resilience.

The reconstruction of Darwin not only transformed the city into a modern urban centre; it caused a shift in how Australia views the intersection of disaster response and urban planning. The introduction of stricter building codes, designed to withstand Category 5 cyclones, became a cornerstone of our disaster preparedness. The recovery also highlighted the importance of local leadership, community involvement and a whole-of-nation response to disasters.

While we’ve made progress since Cyclone Tracy, the growing threat of climate change means that disaster resilience today requires an even more multifaceted approach. Our report explores the need to look beyond building codes and infrastructure and include advancements in predictive technologies such as satellite monitoring and early warning systems. Equally important is empowering local communities, particularly those in vulnerable regions like northern Australia, to take proactive measures and adapt to changing conditions. We cannot afford to be reactive. We must be anticipatory in our approach to future disasters.

In this context, Cyclone Tracy offers not only a historical lesson but a clear call to action. The resilience of Darwin in the face of overwhelming destruction was impressive, but future threats demand that we take a more proactive, strategic approach. Australia’s National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework is a step in the right direction, but it must evolve to meet the demands of an increasingly volatile climate. The growing frequency of cascading disasters—whether bushfires, floods, or cyclones—requires even greater collaboration and resource-sharing between government, industry and the private sector.

The 50th anniversary of Cyclone Tracy must not only be a moment of reflection but a reminder that disaster resilience is a dynamic, ongoing process. Northern Australia is particularly vulnerable to cyclones, heatwaves and flooding, and it cannot afford complacency.

As climate risks continue to escalate, we need to invest in smarter, more resilient infrastructure, better systems of disaster response, and more informed, empowered communities. Traditional knowledge, particularly from Indigenous communities in northern Australia, must also be integrated into disaster planning, offering invaluable lessons on sustainable living and resource management.

The legacy of Cyclone Tracy is clear: resilience is not just about recovery, but about preparation. As Australia faces the challenges of climate change, we must build on the lessons of the past to ensure a safer, more resilient future. This anniversary is an opportunity to strengthen our commitment to disaster preparedness, ensuring that Australia remains a global leader in disaster resilience and recovery.

By taking Cyclone Tracy’s lessons and adapting them to today’s climate risks, Australia can create a more resilient future for all its communities, ensuring that no one faces disaster alone.

National resilience? Hardly. We’re unprepared for crises

Three landmark reports this year have laid bare an uncomfortable truth: Australia is dangerously unprepared for crises.

Each report brings distinct yet complementary insights:

The Glasser review into disaster governance arrangements found that resilience has no dedicated home at the Commonwealth level. Its seven key recommendations emphasise the need for stronger leadership, including an elevated role for National Cabinet in coordinating resilience initiatives and the introduction of an annual National Resilience Report to Parliament, with clear metrics and a strengthened focus on climate risk.

The Telecommunications Sector Resilience Profile, of which I was the lead author, shows weaknesses at the sector level, with the concept of resilience only at an early stage of integration into federal policies. The report established a framework of seven guiding principles supported by 34 specific capabilities. This framework provides both a roadmap for enhancement and a mechanism to track progress in strengthening telecommunications infrastructure.

And the Colvin review examined disaster funding mechanisms, warning that without immediate, evidence-based investment in risk reduction, Australia faced an unsustainable rise in disaster-related costs. Its 44 recommendations, underpinned by eight design principles, outlined a more focused Commonwealth role, including new accountability measures and annual reporting requirements.

These reports converge on fundamental gaps: we lack a shared vision of success, clear lines of responsibility and ways to measure improvement. Without addressing these basics, Australia’s crisis response will remain fragmented and reactive.

The telecommunications sector perfectly illustrates these challenges. Modern networks are engineering marvels working invisibly in our daily lives, until they fail, as we saw in the Optus outage last year.

The problem runs deeper than individual failures. Our research at ANU revealed severe gaps in how we manage the interplay between markets and government regulation. When crises hit, we discover these gaps the hard way.

For example, the dependency of telecommunications on energy providers is a key vulnerability. Telecommunications providers do not often have prior warning of plans by energy providers to de-energise or re-energise the electricity grid. The Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements recommended improved cooperation between the telecommunications and energy sectors after the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires, however current efforts have not improved the relationship, industry insiders say.

More worrying still is our diminishing ability to learn from these failures. Australia’s cyber intelligence agency has seen a decline in incident reporting. Instead, businesses are putting legal protection over transparency and collective improvement. This creates a dangerous knowledge gap: how can we improve if we don’t know what’s going wrong?

Each disruption offers lessons, yet we lack a systematic way to capture insights, implement changes across sectors and hold government and industry accountable for improvement.

The Glasser review notes differing meanings of resilience. For remote communities, it may mean preserving major employers. For national security planners, it encompasses regional security, supply chain stability, cyber threats, natural disasters and terrorism. In telecommunications, resilience can mean, for example, ensuring businesses’ revenue or students’ access to online learning.

Differing interpretations of resilience can lead to institutional inertia. Various groups can claim their expectations aren’t being met while they wait for others to act. Resilience becomes both everyone’s responsibility and no one’s.

The telecommunications sector demonstrates the difficulty of making achievement of resilience actionable for industry. As each provider defines resilience based on its commercial interests, sector-wide efforts are often at cross-purposes.

The Telecommunications Sector Resilience Profile proposed a principles-based cyber governance framework based on the UN’s Principles for Resilient Infrastructure. This practical application of the UN’s principles could inform their use in other critical infrastructure sectors.

The Colvin review makes clear we’re still trying to solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s funding models. Complex funding arrangements often fail those who need help most by creating a system in which success depends more on grant-writing expertise than need. While well-resourced organisations can navigate the bureaucratic maze, our most vulnerable communities—those facing language barriers, disability or geographic isolation—are left exposed.

The telecommunications sector perfectly illustrates this brewing crisis. Major carriers cannot justify skyrocketing infrastructure costs to meet growing data demands while revenue streams struggle to keep pace. This isn’t just a business problem; it’s a national security issue. When commercial imperatives clash with resilience requirements, short-term thinking often wins.

The last few years have forced faster crisis decision-making, but speed without strategy has left us lurching between emergencies. These three reports share a common message: breaking this cycle requires more than just response plans.

Effective crisis leadership demands clear objectives that guide priorities, robust systems that ensure dependable action, and shared measures of success. Building true resilience demands more than chasing spot fires—it demands transformative thinking.

Different thinking for a resilient Australia

Australians proudly display their resilience when they band together during a crisis and then stoically move on. In rural and remote communities, resilience is a required and highly prized commodity. However, the frequency and concurrency of national crises are ‘eroding our ability to respond and fatiguing our emergency management response systems’. Four years of fires, Covid-19, supply-chain impacts and flooding have left us exhausted and overstretched, and yet we continue to be overly reliant on individual and community resilience.

Australia has experienced so many adverse events, affecting so many people, over such an intense period, that ‘resilience’ is now the word we often hear. It gets applied to everything from the state of our health system and building standards to educational programs and, of course, disaster preparedness and recovery. Its use in our discourse perhaps comes only second in frequency to ‘unprecedented’.

We expect Australians to be stoic, but at what cost? In 2021–22, a survey found that 16.8% of Australians suffered from anxiety, which is an increase from 13% in 2017–18—a trend that is cause for concern. While there are many reasons for these results, the links with our national resilience shouldn’t be understated.

Governments at all levels are now focusing on ‘resilience’, but clarity about what is required at the grassroots level continues to elude them. Commonly this resilience focus is associated with disaster or crisis response. The problem with that is the inherent emphasis on reactively fixing a problem rather than creating an environment where the impact of crises—natural or otherwise—could be eliminated or significantly curtailed.

Despite active use of words such as ‘preparedness’ and ‘mitigation’, the focus on disaster response continues to be at the expense of regional pre-disaster prosperity, sustainability and resilience. One of the regions in which that effect is particularly pronounced is northern Australia.

We rely on the north for so much. The region has geostrategic importance for our national security, and through its natural resources it contributes disproportionately to Australia’s economy. However, the adverse impact of national challenges on the north is often more apparent given its fragile infrastructure and the boom-and-bust economic cycles and extreme seasonal climate variation.

The findings of the defence strategic review are now with the government for consideration. We’ll soon know the implications for the north of the defence organisation’s meeting ‘the estate, infrastructure, disposition, logistics and security investments required to provide Australia with the Defence force posture required’ and meeting its ‘preparedness, and mobilisation needs’. The success of defence operations in the north is dependent on addressing key questions missing in the resilience conversation: what outcome is needed from a focus on resilience, and how will a resilience outcome will be achieved?

In the past, I’ve noted that in the north, and any other remote region for that matter, its ‘not about spending more money; it’s about embracing modern nation-building through cross-jurisdictional and cross-sectoral collaboration that achieves more effective multi-use—and multi-user—outcomes’. I’ve also noted that whole-of-community capability is needed in the north, which requires collaboration by governments, businesses and communities to establish sustainable capability.

One can’t help but wonder how the plethora of state, territory and federal ‘resilience’ entities, and those with ‘resilience’ hidden in their mandate statements, will achieve the level of collaborative change required. There’s no need to ponder too long, though. Hints to the answer lie in published government reports and updates that continue to focus on sectors (such as industry, health or agriculture) or segments of the population (adolescents or employees, for example).

Understanding the northern context is key. While northern Australia comprises 53% of Australia’s land mass, it is home to 5.3% of the national population. It has a median age of 35–39 years, and 16% of northern Australia’s population is Indigenous compared to 2.6% nationally. It is home to seven world heritage sites, produces more than 94% of Australia’s bananas and 93% of Australia’s mangoes, and makes up 90% of Australia’s live cattle exports. These facts represent a different operating environment to that of southern Australia.

However, it’s also important to appreciate that one size won’t fit all. The needs of Darwin are different to those of remote areas of the Northern Territory, which are different to the needs of Cairns and Broome. Those operating at the local level appreciate this best, but they struggle to navigate the federated system of government and the supporting (and burgeoning) ‘resilience’ bureaucracies.

Resilience won’t be achieved if local communities continue to be required to compete with each other for one-off, sector-specific federal or state grants. Sustained investment is needed that taps into local strengths and supports nation-building opportunities.

There’s a need to disrupt the outdated thinking and divert governments off the well-worn but ineffective track.

To achieve Australia’s security outcomes, we need to drive economic and social prosperity in the north through a co-designed national framework that guides whole-of-region and whole-of-nation thinking, encourages regional operating models and fosters investment in robust, local physical and social infrastructure.

While pieces of this puzzle do exist, more effort is needed to complete the picture and ensure it is sustained.

Building research capacity for a disaster-resilient Australia

Australia’s threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past 12 months—starting with last summer’s cataclysmic bushfires, followed by the appearance of Covid-19 and its cascading impacts on society and the economy, and now the expected arrival of La Niña weather patterns bringing increased rainfall and the onset of an early monsoon season in the tropics as well as increased cyclonic activity.

While current conditions are very different to those leading up to last year’s crises, state, territory and federal agencies and local governments have sustained their efforts over the winter period to mitigate risk factors critical to the summer ahead. A viable question, however, is what does Australia need to emphasise now to position itself to better cope with the conditions of our near future?

Some steps towards answering that question have been taken by the initiation of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. The royal commission published a set of interim observations on 31 August providing some insight into the direction of its thinking. These observations cover a selection of issues ranging from cultural burning practices and existing national natural disaster arrangements (including constitutional issues) to community health impacts and the role of local government.

A few days later, on 4 September, counsel assisting the royal commission released a set of draft propositions covering aspects of the terms of reference for the commission, informed by submissions and evidence supplied since hearings began in May this year.

While each document addresses several important elements, both focus on supporting increased research to enhance Australia’s resilience to natural hazards and reduce disaster risk, aligned to national research priorities.

A key driver of that research capacity is the new national disaster research centre, announced by the government on 23 July with a commitment of $88.1 million over 10 years. The centre will be ‘co-funded by partners from across Australia, including state and territory governments and emergency service agencies, universities and industry partners’. It is expected to be collaborative on a national scale.

Collaboration within Australia’s higher education system on disaster resilience outcomes is obviously of benefit to all, but a question of some interest is how to structure a collective effort. Here are two ideas to support this important outcome.

The first focuses on intra-university teaching and research collaboration. In August 2011, the Innovative Research Universities (IRU) group published a brochure titled ‘Disaster resilience: preparing, responding and adapting’. It outlined a variety of teaching areas and research strengths among its members that showcased different yet complementary expertise across a range of disaster management and resilience knowledge areas.

A logical extension of the intent of the IRU group could have been the establishment of a consortium to combine the teaching and research expertise of the member universities. Such a step could have led to unique learning opportunities by allowing students to combine units from different institutions, while cross-registered, and receive full credit for towards their final qualification.

Access to these types of opportunities would also allow undergraduate and postgraduate students to complete modularised units of study that match their professional development needs: some in their home university and others with partner institutions. In the case of disaster management agencies, in-service students could have combined units of study that meet institution-specific needs.

Further collaboration among consortium partners for joint supervision of higher degree research students would have required little additional effort given the processes already used in the Cotutelle model common in many Australian universities for linking with international universities on joint supervision of local PhD candidates.

Alliances like the IRU group’s are not uncommon among Australian universities. The NUW Alliance for example, comprising the University of Newcastle, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, cooperates on shared strategic priorities in research and teaching that each institution might not be able to pursue on its own.

The second idea entails establishing or reinvigorating applied research centres or institutes to examine natural hazards and disaster resilience within universities and act as enablers of innovative thinking in private-sector and public-sector institutions active in disaster management. Australian universities have a long history of supporting research groups in these areas. Notable among those currently active are the Torrens Resilience Institute at Flinders University, the Australian National University’s Disaster Risk Science Institute, the Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety at the University of Melbourne, and Monash University’s Disaster Resilience Initiative. They, like those that came before, play important facilitation roles between academia’s ‘hallowed halls’ and the real world.

Creating wider opportunities to educate new cohorts of disaster management professionals and to generate new and easily utilised knowledge at both regional and national levels is critical. Australia can’t afford to be in a position in which new entrants to the professions active in emergency and disaster management and resilience building must wait to learn real-world skills and develop insight on the job. Neither can we afford to leave emergency and disaster management agencies reliant on underdeveloped internal research capabilities, especially as research and development may not be core business.

The royal commission’s advice on our national research needs can be supported through the creation (where needed) of university-based research and collaboration centres operating in close coordination with state-based disaster management agencies. In addition, we need to encourage the development of a consortium of universities collaborating on teaching core and evolving skills for enhancing disaster resilience. Such programs should be offered at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels, using the established Cotutelle model (where feasible) for domestic co-supervision of higher degree research candidates across consortium members.

The intellectual capability for these innovations exists already in our universities. We need to apply our productive higher education sector to support the new all-hazards, all-threats crisis-readiness and response repertoire required for the near future and beyond. Australia needs a networked consortium of teaching universities—including regional research centres—supporting our emergency and disaster management needs across the broad spectrum of existential threats we face.

Fostering a culture of disaster preparedness

The devastating floods we’ve recently seen in Japan are an indicator of the kinds of challenges we’re facing as a result of a changing climate.

The landslides and flooding across much of western Japan killed at least 200 people. The Japanese government mobilised 75,000 troops and emergency workers and nearly 80 helicopters for the search-and-rescue effort. The Japan Meteorological Agency noted that parts of southwestern Japan received as much as 10 centimetres of rain per hour.

Since the floods, Japan has faced the ‘silent killer’; its weather agency has declared the heatwave that’s gripping the country a natural disaster. The ‘unprecedented levels of heat’ have claimed at least 65 lives in the past week.

Robert Glasser’s recent Strategist post on climate change and risk reduction strategies noted the improvements in disaster management over the past two decades. He pointed in particular to the establishment of early warning systems and evacuation planning as key additions to capability.

But Glasser also noted that we haven’t made much progress in addressing the economic losses from natural disasters, partly because we’re failing to incorporate risk reduction measures into planning and investment, and also because we’re not sufficiently factoring in climate change.

In both Australia and our region, we’re going to need a much stronger culture of preparedness when it comes to natural disasters. And we’re going to have to lift our readiness efforts for catastrophic disasters.

Insurance will play an increasingly critical role in helping individuals and communities recover from disasters. To reduce the financial burden on individuals, communities and governments, there are few more important or valuable disaster recovery tools than insurance.

At the 2018 meeting of Pacific Islands Forum economic ministers in April, the group considered how to develop a climate change insurance facility for the Pacific islands to manage their vulnerability to the financial impacts of climate change.

Glasser stressed the importance of mitigation efforts, noting that over the next 15 years global investment in new infrastructure will exceed the current value of the entire existing stock, providing ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse the trend of increasing economic losses by embedding additional resilience in the built environment’. This points to the importance of investment in pre-disaster mitigation to enhance resilience and reduce the effects of disasters.

In the US, for example, a recent study by the National Institute of Building Sciences showed that for every $1 invested in mitigation, another $6 was saved on recovery costs later. This should be a marker for Australian state and territory governments to significantly raise their spending on mitigation. Such funding will be important to drive risk reduction.

Fostering a culture of preparedness appears to be a priority of the Australian government’s newly established national resilience taskforce.

But as the head of the taskforce, Mark Crosweller, noted at a recent ASPI event examining strategies for promoting disaster resilience nationally and internationally, we’re going to have to get a lot better at identifying vulnerabilities, rather than just focusing on hazards and exposure to harm.

That’ll involve a system-wide shift in accessing and analysing various types of data about the vulnerabilities faced by people and organisations (insurance companies can help here, as they have lots of relevant risk data). And as Crosweller also noted, we’re going to have to talk a lot more about what we’re prepared to trade or lose when it comes to risk reduction.

No doubt the resilience taskforce will also look at the role individuals can play as the real first responders, and how we can best prepare them to help speed response and recovery efforts.

Countries in our region and Australian disaster agencies will need to work more on continuity planning to ensure that essential government services can be restored quickly and efficiently following a disaster.

By working together as a nation and working with our disaster-prone neighbours, we can reduce the impacts of future disasters by removing historical vulnerabilities. It’s an ambitious goal, yet with the right approaches it’s achievable. Last year’s foreign policy white paper certainly put considerable emphasis on building resilience in the Indo-Pacific.

All of these matters will be raised at the highest regional level when Australia hosts over 50 countries in 2020 for the next Asian Ministerial Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction.

DFAT’s humanitarian coordinator, Jamie Isbister, who also spoke at ASPI’s resilience seminar, pointed out that the 2020 conference provides an opportunity for Australia to show real leadership in disaster preparedness and resilience. It will also create a useful platform over the next two years for Australia and the region to focus on the critical partnerships and issues involved in disaster risk reduction in the Indo-Pacific, the world’s most disaster-prone region.

Time for better disaster management and risk reduction education

 

With Australia’s 2017–18 natural disaster season over, it’s timely to acknowledge the superlative capabilities of our emergency service agencies, planners and support staff, whether working full-time or volunteering, who were on-call during the season.

The costs of recovering and rebuilding after natural disasters is significant. According to Swiss RE Australia, insurance payouts for Cyclone Debbie which hit Queensland in March 2017 topped A$1.69 billion, making it the second most expensive cyclone in Australia’s history, and the 12th most expensive in the world that year.

Leading private sector observers report that the ‘total economic cost of natural disasters in the 10 years to 2016 averaged A$18.2 billion per year, equivalent to 1.2% of average gross domestic product (GDP) over the same period’. Other projections suggest that a total annual cost of natural disasters in Australia could reach $33 billion by 2050. Given that sum, anything to improve our disaster response and mitigation represents a good investment.

While there have been some notable moves to improve management of national resilience issues, non-natural hazards pose a range of challenges that need to be factored into current thinking and practice. For Australia, those include mitigating the impact of disruptions caused by the loss of control of critical infrastructure systems, water scarcity and ecological change, as well as protecting our health and agriculture sectors from the emergence or re-emergence of infectious diseases.

An important question to consider is how best to provide future cohorts of disaster professionals with the academic credentials and professional education they’ll need. In-service training and private educational providers have a role, but universities are critically important, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Our higher education industry peak body, Universities Australia, promotes the sector’s central role in driving competitiveness via research and collaboration with industry. Ensuring that industry funds ‘blue sky’ and applied collaborative research is essential and, as Universities Australia affirms, industry has a central role in keeping Australia ‘clever.’

But when it comes to teaching and supporting skills development applicable to disaster risk reduction functions, we may not yet be clever enough. While there’s a smattering of undergraduate and postgraduate academic courses covering different aspects of emergency and disaster management knowledge in Australia, nowhere is it a major focus of teaching. Some effort has gone into developing generic standards for higher education providers that teach emergency and disaster management, but how or when they should apply is unclear.

Nevertheless, there are opportunities for academia to better support the needs of both students interested in joining the disaster management profession(s) and those working in the field seeking courses relevant to their professional needs.

Here are two ideas to ameliorate this situation, one that’s not so new and another that requires a little out-of-the-box thinking.

The first focuses on inter-university teaching collaboration. In August 2011 the Innovative Research Universities (IRU) group published a brochure titled ‘Disaster resilience: preparing, responding and adapting’. It outlined a variety of teaching areas and research strengths among its members that showcased different but complementary course options across a range of disaster management knowledge areas.

Following on from that, IRU or a similar grouping could have established a consortium to combine the teaching expertise of different universities in the different areas of excellence detailed in the brochure. That would have led to unique learning opportunities by enabling students to combine units from different institutions, receiving full credit for each towards their final qualification.

In such a program, students could have undertaken specialist studies that fitted their needs. In the case of disaster management agencies, in-service students would have combined units of study that met each institution’s specific needs. A consortium wasn’t created then, but there may be no impediment to doing so today.

The second idea requires innovative collaboration directly between universities and disaster management agencies. The glue for such partnerships is the existence of specialist research centres within universities themselves.

An example of such a collaboration was the signing in late 2014 of a memorandum of understanding between the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) and the Centre for Emergency and Disaster Management (CEDM) at the Queensland University of Technology.

The aim was to create what could have become an outsourced research and development capability for the QFES by linking it with the full research capability of a modern technical university with the assistance of the CEDM. This arrangement, had it continued, would likely have delivered significant value to both parties—rapid and comprehensive problem-solving for QFES and access to important real-world research problems and data for research students.

Only a few disaster-related research groups remain active in Australian universities. Two of note are the Monash University Disaster Resilience Initiative (MUDRI) and the Torrens Resilience Institute at Flinders University. They, like those that came before, continue to play an important facilitation role between academia’s ‘hallowed halls’ and the real world. Such centres are both invaluable and potentially undervalued.

Combining wider study choices with the transfer of real-world experiences and knowledge is critical. Australia can’t afford to be in a position in which new entrants to disaster risk reduction and management must wait to learn real-world skills and develop insight ‘on the job’. Neither can it afford to leave disaster response and recovery agencies reliant on underdeveloped internal research capabilities, especially as research and development may not be core business.

We need to deepen collaboration between response agencies and universities, and support the creation of graduates who are as job-ready as we can make them. It’s time to think and act differently.

The National Resilience Taskforce: challenges and opportunities

Established late last year, the Department of Home Affairs has initiated changes in both governance arrangements and thinking about national security in an all-hazards context.

The changes continue apace. Last month the Minister for Law Enforcement and Cyber Security, Angus Taylor, announced that Home Affairs will host a new National Resilience Taskforce focused on natural disasters, to be led by the former Director-General of Emergency Management Australia, Mark Crosweller.

The significance of disaster risk reduction, and of generating agile approaches to the effects of natural hazards—on communities, the essential services they rely on, and our economy generally—are beyond dispute.

We need only look back to the 2016–17 cyclone season to see the effects of Tropical Cyclone Debbie. Based on Swiss RE Australia assessments, Debbie was the second most expensive cyclone in Australia’s history, and the 12th most expensive in the world that year. Insurance payouts topped A$1.69 billion.

The costs of natural disasters to Australian communities and the economy over several years has been significant. The total annual cost of natural disasters in Australia is projected to increase from A$9 billion to $33 billion by 2050. Owing to the regularity and size of losses, members of the finance community created the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities (ABR). That collaboration of significant Australian businesses—Munich Re, Optus, Westpac, IAG and Investa, as well as the Australian Red Cross—promotes the coordination of disaster mitigation across the private and public sectors.

ABR recently presented an analysis by Deloitte Access Economics on nine recent disaster reviews that found that of the 124 recommendations made in those reviews to improve resilience, just 13 have been implemented. Twenty-six are in progress but have no clearly defined timeframe for completion. Some it is suggested haven’t been actioned at all.

National progress to develop resilience has been slow, fragmented and reactive. Australia needs a more sustainable, coordinated, comprehensive national approach. We’d note here that insurance plays a critical role in improving preparedness before a disaster strikes, as well as in helping people recover after.

Minister Taylor hasn’t yet fully set out the National Resilience Taskforce’s terms of reference. But he’s stated that the taskforce has a major goal of reducing the impacts of natural disasters on the Australian community.

The first step, as outlined by the Minister, is the development of a national disaster mitigation framework. That’s critical. Building a prepared society must involve investing more in mitigation. A recent study from the US National Institute of Building Sciences found, for example, that every dollar invested in mitigation saves six dollars in recovery costs later.

A second step is the establishment of a national disaster risk information capability to improve the public’s understanding of disaster preparation, enhance community self-protection measures, and improve decision-making in the private and public sectors.

These are important activities. But they don’t explicitly target better multi-sector resilience as a national goal. The goal outlined by Minister Taylor must also be considered against a backdrop of earlier policy considerations, practices and commentary in similar areas.

The idea of national resilience–based policy and legislative coordination has been ‘on the books’ for some time. In December 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed to adopt a whole-of-nation resilience-based approach to disaster management, which recognised that a national, coordinated and cooperative effort was needed to enhance Australia’s capacity to prepare for, withstand and recover from disasters.

The National Emergency Management Committee subsequently developed the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience, which COAG adopted in February 2011.The new taskforce should ensure that it takes the lead in updating that seven-year-old strategy—or at least has a major influence on the final result.

An updated Resilience Strategy, aligned with the disaster mitigation framework, should also detail a national approach to continuity and recovery planning for essential infrastructure systems.

It’s not only natural hazards that disrupt communities and the public and private sectors. Our national infrastructure is ageing, and not always gracefully. It’s being placed under greater stress from users trying to extract more in key sectors like power, transport and water supplies. The nation’s infrastructure faces new hazards, both man-made and naturally occurring.

We need to mitigate cascading effects on critical infrastructure. This issue will need to be considered by the taskforce, working closely with the Critical Infrastructure Centre in the Department of Home Affairs.

Establishing a national disaster risk information capability to aid public- and private-sector planners and decision-makers makes sense. But a key challenge will be to determine what information about disaster mitigation efforts is relevant and needed at each level—national, state and territory, and local—in both the public and private sectors.

Finally, the taskforce will also need to ensure that the many stakeholders share enough common disaster management terminology to make possible the joint efforts that will be required.

The currently stated deliverables of the National Resilience Taskforce are challenging. The taskforce’s potential to deliver useful results shouldn’t be limited by an overly constrained scope of review. Hopefully, its final terms of reference will allow the taskforce to adopt an ambitious work program around national disaster resilience, especially mitigation measures.