As CEO of Darwin City Council after Cyclone Tracy devastated the town in 1974, Greg Hoffman is no stranger to natural disasters.

Today, as executive director of the North West Queensland Regional Organisation of Councils (NWQROC) he’s confronting the same themes.

The organisation represents nine councils covering an area from western Townsville to the NT border and Gulf of Carpentaria, encompassing parts of the state hit by severe flooding in 2019.

“It’s an area well versed in natural disaster,” Mr Hoffman said during a panel discussion on building resilient communities at a local government event in Sydney last week.

“As a consequence of that, over generations we have developed well-honed systems in our response to disaster.”

Having experienced disaster in the past, a central focus for NWQROC is currently getting ahead of the game in terms of resilience, he says.

Investing in infrastructure

A key aspect in building resilience is investing in infrastructure, Mr Hoffman says.

He outlined as an example the recent conclusion of a project by the state’s reconstruction authority (QRA), in collaboration with 28 local councils, to install more than 170 flood warning assets in the north.

The $8 million initiative came ahead of a third La Nina season and an increased risk of cyclones and flooding for the region, federal emergency management minister Murray Watt said last week.

The monitoring and alert stations, made by Queensland-based contractor Qtech, relay data  and camera images to councils, infrastructure agencies and the BoM to inform response and mitigation plans. 

Mr Hoffman says NWQROC has also developed a regional resilience strategy and pooled resources to design an app that provides accessible real-time disaster information

The Get Ready NWQ app collates disaster dashboards and warning information from every council so residents, visitors and travelers can find relevant information and plan their response.

Communication

Understanding and communicating risk across the community is also crucial to building disaster resilience.

Fellow panellist Sam Kernaghan, director of the Committee of Sydney’s resilience program, said New Zealand’s City of Wellington learnt this the hard way after rebuilding from a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck in 2016, causing ruptures and a tsunami.

“What that earthquake made them realise … was that if they didn’t sort out their approach to risk, the city would quickly lose its investment from major corporations and universities,” Mr Kernaghan said.

“People were saying if don’t do this people are actually going to start leaving because they don’t fee safe, they don’t see a future case to invest.”

The response included a major communication campaign about what the city was doing to reduce risk, which included using VR, and drawing a blue line around the city to help the community understand sea level risks.

Wellington City Council has also been running workshops for residents and councilors.

Shocks and stresses

Beck Dawson is chief resilience officer at Resilient Sydney, a local government program hosted by City of Sydney on behalf of metropolitan Sydney councils.

She says resilience can be measured by the ability to understand not only shocks, like natural disasters, but stresses, such as housing pressure, disease, population expansion and climate change.

“When you layer a shock event over a stress you can numericise the scale of impact,” Ms Dawson told the Local Government Show on Wednesday. “You can monetise it, or scale the problem, and start to prioritise things.”

Sydney’s urban heat problem illustrated the interplay of shocks and stresses, she said.

 “The part where it’s hottest (Sydney’s west) is also where the stresses are most prevalent,” she said.

“You’ve got a big community, high levels of chronic disease, low capacity to pay for mitigations like air conditioning. Put a stonking big heatwave over that and you’ve got a really dangerous mix.”

Ms Dawson says having comprehensive data helps authorities and planners understand the intersection of shocks and stresses, and to this purpose Resilient Sydney is building a massive data platform that will hold environment data for whole city, as well as social and economic data sets.

She says the platform currently consists of 20 data sets and has 330 active users, including local government, corporate and town planners, and social and environmental managers.

Drought resilience

Metropolitian areas aren’t the only ones invested in building resilience.

Cindy Cassidy, director of the SNSW Drought Innovation Hub at Charles Sturt University, says the team is looking at innovative ways of working with regional communities to understand risks, prepare for events and assist recovery.

The hub is one of eight established around Australia to support farmers and communities that are under threat from drought.

“We’re thinking about our regional communities in the context of tipping points for resilience and how do we create a buffer for them,” Ms Cassidy said during the panel discussion.

Current projects are looking at managing rangelands for drought resistance, building community awareness of biosecurity management and harnessing agtech in the livestock industry.

One project, being led the by the University of Canberra, is looking at leveraging early insights to prevent hardship and mental health damage before it occurs.

“We’re tying to pull together diverse data sets and use AI and modern approaches to statistical analysis to see if we can get very early indicators of when our communities are moving into stress … without having to rely on lag indicators,” she said.

“It might be a combination of the shopping basket on a weekly basis, correlated with farmer nitrogen purchases or diesel consumption at the local bowser to see how people are responding to changing conditions.”

A question of resources

Disaster resilience requires resources that the ratebases of many communities will struggle to support.

However panellists agreed whether it’s an economic imperative as occurred in Wellington or a tipping point like an actual disaster, local government will have little choice but to find ways of responding.

There’s a need to invest significantly more in things that mitigate and prevent the consequences of the hazard.

Greg Hoffman

Mr Hoffman says history has shown it takes a disaster to spur action.

 “We’ve asked ourselves why didn’t we do something before, but the point is there wasn’t the serious political commitment and community understanding that comes out of adversity,” he said.

“That is the motivation that brings the politics and community aspirations into line.”

Ultimately he says policy makers need to accept there has to be a greater investment in disaster preparedness than in the response.

“Of all the money spent on disasters, 97 per cent at the moment is spent on recovery only three per cent on preparedness,”  he said.

“The objective is to flip that. There’s a need to invest significantly more in things that mitigate and prevent the consequences of the hazard.”

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