Nature-led resilience to disasters

Australia’s NRM sector is national infrastructure providing interlinked, regionally embedded expertise and capabilities for improving landscape-resilience, including disaster resilience.

54 regional NRM organisations work through local networks and community engagement to manage natural resources and landscapes.

NRM organisations play a pivotal role in rapid response to natural disasters and emergencies, as shown below.

NRM regional organisations are strengthening their capabilities to embed disaster resilience into core planning and programs, including through nature-based approaches.

Strengthened attention to disaster preparedness and  resilience builds on long-standing principles and approaches embedded in the NRM approach:

• trialling and adoption of a novel solutions
• focus on participatory and community engaged approaches, and
• support for First Nations caring for Country.

Regional NRM organisations’ contribution to disaster response was seen in their actions to protect and recover landscapes in the 2019-20 wildfires, through:

• Rapid place-based response to protect and recover landscapes,
• Serving as a focal point for community action and coordination,
• Supporting First Nations priorities,
• Providing a conduit for resources to support rapid on-ground action, and
• Delivering knowledge and information to communities and landholders.

NRM organisations collaborated nationally to share knowledge and capability.

This experience gave a renewed urgency to move beyond recovery to building long-term resilience by:

• Strengthening coordination between agencies,
• Developing pre-approved emergency response plans,
• Establishing more flexible funding for timely response, and
• Ensuring long-term investment in the NRM sector to safeguard
  knowledge and standing capability.

All 54 NRM regions developed the first ever comprehensive regional Biodiversity and Natural Capital Assets Emergency Preparedness Response Plans (EPRPs) across Australia in 2023-2024, with funding support from the Commonwealth government.

The plans:

• Define the priority natural capital and agricultural assets in each NRM region,
• Identify the risks to those assets presented by extreme events
• Define management responses for the planning, preparedness, response and recovery phases of such events.

This planning process is seen as a beginning. With extreme events becoming the norm, long-term adaptation and resilience is critical, and calls for new ways of thinking and working.

Nature-based Solutions for Disaster Resilience

Nature-based solutions (NbS) intentionally use nature and ecosystems to deliver benefits to people, including disaster resilience. They deliver benefits for people and nature simultaneously.

NbS are widely used internationally, and the NRM sector is helping to drive the adoption and scaling up of NbS for disaster resilience in Australia.

This work encompasses:

1. Field trials of NbS for flood and fire resilience in Australian conditions, such as:

• • • Strategic revegetation to create living or green fire breaks on productive land to reduce landscape level bushfire risks.
    • Riparian restoration and management to mitigate flood risks.
    • Rehydration of landscapes and stabilisation of hydrology to reduce flood and bushfire risks.
    • First-Nations led cultural fire management to improve landscape health and reduce bushfire risks.

2. Evaluating the benefits of NbS for disaster risk reduction.

3. Developing a National Impact Framework to standardise quantification of benefits.

4. Identifying policy and planning reforms to enable greater uptake of NbS in Australia.

We also support an ongoing Knowledge Hub and Community of Practice to grow the capability of NRM practitioners and partners to design, implement, and manage NbS for disaster resilience.