Global Resilience Collaborative (GRC) welcomes the recently produced report by the Productivity Commission examining the funding arrangements.  To most people involved in resilience to disruptions such as natural disasters it was not a surprise to learn that the report found that ‘governments nationally focus too much on recovery, at the expense of redirecting resources towards better-preparing for the future disasters”.

Following are key points from the report.  The full report can be accessed via the link at the end of page.

 

• Australia is exposed to natural disasters on a recurring basis. Effective planning and mitigation of risks is an essential task for governments, businesses and households.
• Current government natural disaster funding arrangements are not efficient, equitable or sustainable. They are prone to cost shifting, ad hoc responses and short-term political opportunism. Groundhog Day anecdotes abound.
• Governments overinvest in post-disaster reconstruction and underinvest in mitigation that would limit the impact of natural disasters in the first place. As such, natural disaster costs have become a growing, unfunded liability for governments.
• The funding arrangements matter because they impact the incentives to manage risks, including by using potent but politically challenging levers like land use planning. The reform imperative is greatest for states most exposed to natural disaster risk, like Queensland.
• The recommended reforms comprise a coherent policy package across recovery and mitigation funding, budget treatment of recovery costs, and accountability requirements for all governments. ‘Cherry picking’ component parts would see the much needed balance between mitigation and recovery, as well as greater state autonomy, remain elusive.
• Australian Government post-disaster support to state and territory governments (states) should be reduced, and support for mitigation increased. Greater budget transparency and some provisioning is also needed.◦States need to shoulder a greater share of natural disaster recovery costs to sharpen incentives to manage, mitigate and insure against these risks. The Australian Government should provide a base level of support to states commensurate with relative fiscal capacity and the original ‘safety-net’ objective of disaster recovery funding, with the option for states to purchase ‘top-up’ fiscal support.

◦Australian Government mitigation funding to states should increase to $200 million a year and be matched by the states.

◦These reforms would give state and local governments autonomy in how they pursue disaster recovery and mitigation. The reforms should be supported by performance and process based accountability mechanisms that embed good risk management.

 

• Governments have a role in providing emergency relief payments to individuals seriously affected by natural disasters, to defray immediate economic and social hardship. Such relief should be provided in a consistent, equitable and efficient way.
• Governments can do better in terms of policies that enable people to understand natural disaster risks and also to give them the incentive to manage the risks effectively.◦Information on hazards and risk exposure has improved significantly in recent years, but there are opportunities to improve information consistency, sharing and communication.

◦Regulations affecting the built environment have a significant influence on the exposure and vulnerability of communities to natural hazards. While building regulations have generally been effective, there is a need to transparently incorporate natural disaster risk management into land use planning.

 

• Insurance is an important risk management option. Insurance markets in Australia for natural disaster risk are generally working well, and pricing is increasingly risk reflective. Insurers can and should do more to inform households on their insurance policies, the natural hazards they face and the indicative costs of rebuilding after a natural disaster

 

Source: http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/disaster-funding/report

 

By Richard Williams

Communities that develop a high level of resilience are better able to withstand a crisis event and have an enhanced ability to recover from residual impacts. Communities that possess resilience characteristics can also arrive on the other side of a crisis in a stronger position than pre-event. For example:

• a community with well rehearsed emergency plans
• superior fire mitigation processes in the cooler months
• appropriate building controls, suitable to local hazards and risks
• widely adopted personal and business financial mitigation measures (e.g. insurance suitable to the risks)

is likely to suffer less during an extreme fire event and is likely to be able to recover quickly; financially, physically and as a community.’

(Insurance Council of Australia 2008, Improving Community Resilience to Extreme Weather Events)

The National Emergency Management Committee of the Council of Australian Governments provides oversight of the development of a national resilience strategy. At a Commonwealth level, the coordination resides in the Department of the Attorney-General.

It is clear in Australia that there is an understanding of ‘resilience’ driven by both internal factors, ongoing challenges of natural disasters and external factors such as the acknowledgement of delivering on the commitments underlining such conventions as the Hyogo framework. At a political level what does this mean?

The Commonwealth, states and territories continue to meet to work out an agenda; unfortunately it’s largely compromised by respective views of responsibility. The Commonwealth is seen as the source of funding to underpin resilience but ownership of the tactical and operational elements are clearly a non-Commonwealth responsibility. The Australian Constitution made no provision for the Commonwealth in the area of emergency management and the country has paid the price since by the fractured nature of responsibility. While the Commonwealth owns the responsibility for national defence to counter external threats, the greater risk to Australia is delivered by natural disasters. Australians are more likely to lose their lives and property from home-based disasters than they are from external threat.

Resilience and the embracing of this as a national priority may see the current parochialism overtaken by the acknowledgement that resilience needs to be a nationally coordinated activity. This may be hastened by changing the current approach of a top down and imposed process into one that is driven from the grassroots. Local communities, business groups and other vested interests could largely shape the national framework for resilience. It’s a case of bringing together these divergent entities to shape what a national resilience strategy should look like. Dependence on a bureaucratic solution that is battling with entrenched ‘turf’ issues is not going to provide a solution any time soon.

What are your thoughts on how leadership in the area of community resilience could be driven by grassroots leadership?

 

About: Richard Williams is formerly the Director of Strategic Policy for Emergency Services in Queensland, Australia. In this role he was instrumental in reviewing disaster legislation and regulations and developing the disaster framework of response for the government. He also represented the state on a range of national bodies, assisting the Council of Australian Governments in the implementation of its landmark report Natural Disasters in Australia: Reforming mitigation, relief and recovery arrangements (August 2002). Richard’s interests lie in the application of disaster resilience at all levels of government and society, particularly the application of the Hyogo Framework for Action and its implementation. Evidence shows that addressing disaster resilience provides many dividends and incorporating it into strategic and operational planning can save lives, protect property and accelerate recovery and economic growth.

The past decade has ushered in an era of resilience and collaboration as two pillars upon which the future of a city’s capacity to flourish may increasingly be dependent. The emergence of disruptive forces, be they technological, cultural, political or natural, has created an opportunity for an entrepreneurial approach to city flourishing. The key lies in re-imagining the city on the basis of its capacity to reformulate itself as a collaborative system well placed to manage disruption, and allows it to continue to grow. Resilience must be crafted around a collaborative strategy…READ ON

The third United Nations world conference on disaster risk reduction is concluding today in Sendai.  Global Resilience Collaborative has been following the developments thanks to web video streaming and other document sharing means. Since the last conference in 2005 when the delegates agreed to endorse Hyogo Framework for Action recommending the way forward for global resilience building, many large scale natural disasters have occurred including the host country’s triple disaster in the eastern region (Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor failure), Super-cyclone Sandy, Cyclone Yolanda, Queensland Floods, Central European Floods and many more.

We recommend you visiting the conference home page as it has trove of documents resulting from the conference which undoubtedly will play the key role in the global policy and practice in developing disaster resilient societies.  With a slight bias toward the Australian members of the Global Resilience Collaborative we wish to share with you excerpts from the statement by the Hon. Michael Keenan, Minister for Justice made on the first day of the conference.

“We strongly welcome this opportunity to take action, and strengthen disaster resilience by adopting a new framework that builds on considerable success of the Hyogo Framework.”

“In Australia we have come a long way in our journey to build our resilience in shifting our focus from ‘response and recovery’ to ‘preparation and mitigation’.”

“As I noted previously Australia is situated in a vulnerable region, and we are committed to building co-operative partnerships to support resilience through our aid program.”

“It is important that we take action now to build resilience, and we implore member states to do so.”

“We also know failure to do so is a missed opportunity that will impact hardest on the people who are the most vulnerable.”

Full speech available on the conference website: http://webtv.un.org/watch/michael-keenan-australia-3rd-plenary-meeting/4112026583001

 

 

As many of you already know well the Rockefeller Foundation is the lead agency behind the Global Resilience Partnership and their initiative called the Global Resilience Challenge. In their own words, “essential feature of the Resilience Partnership is a multi-phase resilience design challenge, focused on bringing together people and organizations from across sectors to collaborate on bold and innovative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges in the three focus regions: the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and South and Southeast Asia. Multi-sectoral teams will collectively research and diagnose problems, and develop locally driven, high-impact solutions that can build resilience at scale”.

Our own collaborative (GRC) submitted a proposal which focused on developing and implementing a resilience program which was tailored to community resilience and the specific role of local culture. Partially the program was inspired by our collective experience and knowledge in building resilience in the Australian Aboriginal communities. Suffice to say, the competition was global and more than 500 proposal were in the competition. In the end only 17 were won the opportunity to go to the next phase. In the mix of 17 winners there is also one team from Australia; University of Sydney. While we at Global Resilience Collaborative believe Australia has the expertise to offer more than what is currently being offered we are certainly excited to know that a team from Australia is engaged globally. No doubt, University of Sydney team will do an excellent job with their project called “Disability and Disasters: Empowering People and Building Resilience to Risk”.

We at the Global Resilience Collaborative are very pleased to see that the challenge was very much focused on collaboration.  Collaboration is the key to solving one of the biggest challenges facing societies globally.  This is especially the case when we realise that disruptions to economic and social wellbeing caused by natural disasters are not local issues any more. Global village means collaborative village.

For more details on the challenge and the current teams see the Global Resilience Partnership website.

 

Perhaps the most prominent advocate of resilience in the world Dr Judith Rodin, the CEO of Rockefeller Foundation recently penned the highly acclaimed The Resilience Dividend book focusing on ‘”managing disruption, avoiding disasters and growing stronger in an unpredictable world”.  The book and the effort are worth sharing with the broader audience.  Global Resilience Collaborative strongly urges our readers and colleagues to learn more.  For now we are happy to share the bellow article recently published by The Guardian.

 

Judith Rodin’s new book, The Resilience Dividend, begins with her surveying the destruction wrought by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. “There were the low-lying neighbourhoods of Staten Island exposed to sea rise, flooding and storm surge, where people had died in the storm. I saw damaged dunes and other soft, natural infrastructure that had been washed away, leaving neighbourhoods completely unprotected … I saw homes destroyed, neighbourhoods disrupted, people’s lives destroyed.”…READ ON