Thoughts on the Select Committee Report on Australia’s Disaster Resilience

In August 2024, a Senate committee examining Australia’s disaster resilience released its long-awaited report to Parliament.

Entitled Boots on the ground: Raising resilience, the detailed report, clocking in at more than 150 pages, explores the variegated issues affecting disaster and emergency management in Australia.

Citing international examples at times, the report proffers ten recommendations on such wide-ranging matters as funding arrangements, mental health supports, emergency volunteering models, and the need to establish a national asset register.

Although these recommendations have made headlines, there’s much more to be gleaned from the report, too. And for that reason, we’ve decided to write the following article providing our thoughts on the Select Committee report on Australia’s Disaster Resilience.

What’s behind the need for disaster resilience?

A report on disaster resilience, why now? This is a question worthy of an article of its own.

The report (specifically) and the interest in disaster resilience (more broadly) are clear responses to eroding conditions on the ground.

How bad have things become?

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) calculates that more than 200 disaster events have taken place since 2019. More than 1,600 disaster declarations have been issued across 434 local government areas (LGAs) in that period, too.

In fact, in 2022, half of Australia’s LGAs were subject to a disaster declaration. A staggering 70% of Australians lived in an LGA impacted by a disaster event.

Add to those numbers, 18 million Australians in 2022 lived in an LGA impacted by at least one natural disaster. In some cases, LGAs were impacted by multiple events over the past three years.

Meanwhile, the average number of people living in an impacted area doubled over the past decade, according to the consultancy KPMG.

The increasing cost of disasters

Besides an increase in the frequency of disasters, the country is also facing an upsurge in the severity of these disasters, too – an uptick we can measure by the simultaneous rise in costs to respond to and recover from disasters.

Here, KPMG found that the value of insured losses caused by natural disasters in 2022 reached a record high, almost $7 billion.

Nor was 2022 an aberration. Trendlines have been pointing in the wrong direction for quite some time now.

The cost of natural disasters in Australia is estimated to increase to $73 billion per annum by 2060, from an average of $18.2 billion in 2016.

Behind this, the medium-term climate forecast doesn’t provide much solace, either. According to the State of the Climate 2022 report, Australia is projected to experience:

• Continued increases in air temperatures, more heat extremes, and fewer cold extremes
• Continued decreases, on average, in cool season rainfall across many regions of southern and eastern Australia, which will likely lead to more time in drought, but with ongoing climate variability that will give rise to short-duration heavy rainfall events at a range of timescales
• Continued increases in the number of dangerous fire weather days and a longer fire season for southern and eastern Australia
• Further sea level rise and continued warming and acidification of the oceans around Australia
• Increased and longer-lasting marine heatwaves that will affect marine environments, such as kelp forests, and increase the likelihood of more frequent and severe bleaching events in coral reefs around Australia
• Fewer tropical cyclones, but a greater proportion is projected to be of high intensity, with large variations from year to year

A decline in volunteerism

While the country now faces worrying climactic patterns, certain to increase the likelihood of costly disasters, it does so with a smaller volunteer population of potential disaster responders.

What’s going on, here?

Survey data from 2022 revealed that around a quarter of adults volunteered in the preceding year.

These rates represented a slight increase from the year before. However, they paled in comparison to pre-COVID numbers. For context, 36% of adults were estimated to have volunteered in the 12 months preceding late 2019.

What’s more, the number of volunteers in government emergency services organizations has decreased by over 20,000 since 2015–16, according to Volunteering Australia.

Driving these declines were sharp decreases in the numbers of young adults volunteering. The proportion of people aged 18–24 years who had volunteered formally in the previous 12 months fell from 36% in late 2019 to 25.6% in April 2021 then finally to an even 25% in 2022.

What’s behind the fall off? The reasons cited were various; according to the Australian Institute of Disaster Resilience, the most common sociodemographic factors included:

• Work-family lifestyle
• Rural population decline
• Preference for more flexible volunteer participation

Increasing reliance on the armed forces eroding disaster resilience

As Australia loses its volunteer force, the country is tapping (perhaps overtaxing) its armed forces, whose primary responsibility is the protection and defense of Australia’s national security, to respond to disasters.

The report, here, cites questions raised about the sustainability of calling on the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to assist in disaster response, as these events increase in frequency.

Defining disaster resilience

The picture painted by the simultaneous increase in disasters and decrease in volunteer disaster responders points up the very need for disaster resilience.

But what is disaster resilience, exactly? The United Nations (UN) Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines disaster resilience thusly:

The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.

Attributes of disaster resilience

How to achieve and maintain disaster resilience, though?

Ensuring disaster resilience, as the report suggests, is a function of adequately managing disaster risk. The latter defined as “potential loss of life, injury, or destroyed or damaged assets that could occur to a system, society or a community” (National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA)).

To reduce disaster risk, Australia, as the report notes, has signed up to the UN’s Sendai Framework. That Framework outlines the following priorities for reducing disaster risk:

• Understanding disaster risk
• Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk
• Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience
• Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to ‘Build Back Better’ in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction

However, resilience itself requires investment dollars. Indeed, the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience calculates that “for every one dollar invested in resilience before a disaster, we can save between $3 and $8 in recovery.”

The communities that prioritize such efforts have many commonalities. Some of the most significant include:

• Emergency management plans are resilience-based, to build disaster resilience within communities over time. Communities, governments, and other organizations take resilience outcomes into account when considering and developing core services, products, and policies. They are adaptive and flexible to respond appropriately in disasters.
• Businesses and other service providers undertake wide-reaching business continuity planning that links with their security and emergency management arrangements.
• Land use planning systems and building control arrangements reduce, as far as is practicable, community exposure to unreasonable risks from known hazards, and suitable arrangements are implemented to protect life and property.

10 recommendations to ensure disaster resilience

But how can Australia translate these attributes to ensure disaster resilience as climate conditions deteriorate? Here, we will quickly pass through the 10 recommendations the report offers:

1. The Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements and relevant guidelines be amended to enable funds to be distributed for the purpose of building betterment into recovery and reconstruction, ensuring that this funding is available to all jurisdictions.
2. The Australian Government establish a national asset register to improve the efficiency of the deployment of resources in the aftermath of a disaster. The Government should consider whether it is feasible to include not only federal and state government assets, but also suitable local community, private sector and non-government organization assets.
3. The Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements be amended to set aside a proportion of funding to be offered to local governments up-front to help facilitate disaster recovery and resilience to ensure councils do not always have to bear the burden of financing repairs up-front.
4. The Australian Government consider amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 to legislate time off for volunteers working with registered organizations and for volunteers to be granted leave from employment, similar to the provisions provided to Reservists under the Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001.
5. The Australian Government consider amendments to legislation, policy and guidelines to allow volunteers working in organizations such as State Emergency and Rural Bushfire Services to claim tax deductions for training and courses that are a part of their emergency volunteering.
6. The Australian Government establish a national disaster mental health hub to coordinate and provide mental health resources, training, and support for first responders and communities affected by disasters across the nation. This hub should serve as a comprehensive resource center for addressing the mental health needs of all stakeholders involved in disaster response and recovery efforts.
7. The Australian Government design and implement consistent national trauma-informed care principles, ensuring that first responders—both professional and volunteer—receive training and support in these national principles to better address the mental health and well-being of disaster-affected individuals and communities.
8. The Australian Government convene a disaster resilience mental health summit to hear from all related agencies and stakeholders to identify solutions to the mental health impacts of disaster.
9. The Australian Government consider how it can further support Disaster Relief Australia, and other similar organizations, not only with funding beyond 2026, but also how the Australian Government can further incorporate Disaster Relief Australia into its national disaster response arrangements and boost its numbers through partnerships with the Australian Defence Force and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
10. The Australian Government consider ways to incentivize young Australians to participate in volunteer organizations that provide support for disaster response and recovery.

Further thoughts on Australia’s disaster resilience

Beyond these official recommendations, the report also references proposals proffered by the extended resilience community.

For instance, Anglicare Australia highlighted the importance of measures to ensure a safe workplace for volunteers, including “suitability checks, training, management and ongoing support in their roles, particularly as disasters become more frequent and intense placing a greater demand on volunteers to work for longer periods.”

The report added another wrinkle to the debate on declining volunteerism, acknowledging the decline in the raw numbers of volunteers but also the poor coordination of volunteers that are willing and able to serve: “Despite the decline in the number of volunteers in Australia, another concern raised in evidence was that there was a lot of good will across Australia to help during a disaster, but the issue of poor coordination impacted the efficacy of that assistance.”

A recommendation that emerged from the resilience community was the need to mobilize volunteers and match them up with the work that needs to be done. Some of this work can be undertaken by emergency management software:

“…there is no good, integrated data system in Australia where those jobs are fed into a single system and the volunteers are fed into another system and you can marry the two up. The data is just all over the place. And that can potentially keep the ADF in the field for longer than they necessarily need to be.”

Nor was this the only mention of digital technology to enhance disaster resilience. Report authors specifically noted the importance of such technologies to enhance disaster communication and response capabilities in disaster-prone areas.

Finally, Australia like many other countries is experiencing a rise in consecutive, concurrent, and compounding crises, with forecasts suggesting that the worst is yet to come.

As a result, policymakers have proposed a series of recommendations to ensure the country remains disaster resilient well into the next century. In this article, we’ve discussed these recommendations as well as other insights gleaned from the Boots on the ground report.

The main takeaway, though, is the continued need to prioritize proactive resilience over reactive response.

What can individual organizations do to prioritize resilience, though? Not mentioned in the report, but we recommend investments in platforms like Noggin, which provide a comprehensive and holistic approach to resilience, facilitate crucial collaboration and coordination, unlock critical insights, keeps stakeholders informed, and streamline essential workflows for planning and response.

But don’t just take our word for it. Request a demonstration to see Noggin in action for yourself.