A more resilient Australia: building a distributed national capability
In brief: Australia has spent years talking about resilience and shared responsibility. But as the risks we face become more severe, interconnected and capable of disrupting several systems at once, I think we need to take the next step. In this article, I explore what a genuinely more resilient Australia might look like, and propose the idea of distributed national capability: building useful capability across society, while strengthening the relationships that allow its different parts to support one another when conditions become difficult. It is less a blueprint than an invitation to think differently about how we prepare for the decades ahead.
I have been thinking for some time about what a more resilient Australia might look like, particularly as we face a climate that is changing rapidly and a future in which disruptions are likely to become more frequent, more severe and increasingly likely to interact with one another.
Much of my work over the past few years has focused on community resilience, so perhaps unsurprisingly this is often where my thinking begins. I remain convinced that communities have an enormously important role to play, but I have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the tendency to locate resilience within any particular part of society.
That probably also reflects the different settings in which I have encountered these questions over the years: working within communities, emergency services and businesses in Australia, as well as in disaster settings, conflicts and war zones internationally. These are very different environments, but they have repeatedly shown me how much our ability to cope with disruption depends on the relationships between people, institutions, infrastructure, resources and the wider systems around them. When one part struggles, others often have to compensate, and when several begin to fail at the same time, seemingly strong systems can become fragile surprisingly quickly.
Communities cannot do this alone, any more than governments, emergency services, businesses or infrastructure providers can. What interests me much more is the relationship between them, and whether we can progressively build enough capability across all these different parts of Australian society that they can continue to function, adapt and support one another through serious disruption.
We still tend to organise much of this work into fairly distinct areas. Emergency services prepare for disasters, governments plan and regulate, businesses undertake continuity planning, infrastructure providers manage essential systems, and communities and households are encouraged to prepare. There are understandable administrative reasons for these distinctions, although they bear less resemblance to what actually happens when a major disruption occurs.
A flood can affect roads, electricity, telecommunications, healthcare, local businesses, schools, food and fuel supplies, housing and ecosystems at more or less the same time. Extreme heat can create pressures across health services, electricity networks, workplaces, agriculture, transport and community welfare. When several events occur together, or one failure begins creating problems elsewhere, the boundaries between these different areas become even less meaningful.
Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment, released in 2025, gives some formal recognition to this reality. It describes the climate risks facing Australia as increasingly cascading, compounding and concurrent, with impacts capable of interacting across communities, infrastructure, economies and ecosystems. I think this is important, because if the character of the risks themselves is becoming more interconnected, then it follows that our approach to resilience needs to become more interconnected as well.
We are not starting from scratch
There has already been a significant evolution in Australian thinking about resilience.
The National Strategy for Disaster Resilience helped establish the idea that resilience is a shared responsibility rather than something that belongs primarily to emergency services. The National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework expanded the focus towards understanding and reducing risk before disasters occur. More recently, the National Adaptation Plan has recognised that climate adaptation involves a series of interconnected systems including communities, infrastructure, ecosystems, food, health, the economy and national security. At state level, initiatives such as NSW's Disaster Adaptation Plans are beginning to translate some of this thinking into regionally coordinated and locally informed approaches.
These are important developments, but the question that interests me is how we take the next step.
Shared responsibility is an important principle, but responsibility is only useful if people and organisations have some practical capacity to exercise it. A household may have responsibilities, but does it understand the risks it faces and have the means to prepare? A community may be expected to participate in resilience, but does it have funding, relationships, communications systems and people with useful skills? A business may provide a service upon which thousands of people depend, but has anyone considered what happens to the surrounding community if that business cannot function for a week? Emergency services may value community participation, but do they have established ways of working with informal groups and spontaneous volunteers when a disaster exceeds formal capacity?
Before considering what that next step might look like, however, I think there is a more fundamental conversation we need to have.
An honest conversation about what we are preparing for
We need a much more honest and sustained national conversation about the risks we face and the direction in which we are heading. The National Climate Risk Assessment provides an important evidence base for that conversation, but assessments only become useful when we are prepared to confront what they might actually mean. We need to be able to talk openly about what increasing heat, fires, floods, droughts, ecosystem degradation, insurance retreat and pressures on food, water, health and infrastructure could mean for different parts of Australia over the coming years and decades.
That conversation needs to be grounded in the best available evidence, without catastrophising but also without reassuring ourselves that incremental adjustments to existing systems will necessarily be sufficient. Some of the implications may be deeply uncomfortable, including questions about where we continue building, which infrastructure we protect, what we can realistically adapt, and where we may eventually have to contemplate much more significant change.
I understand why this is difficult as these are frightening things to contemplate. Governments understandably worry about creating fear, communities are already tired from successive disasters, and most of us have enough immediate problems in our lives without spending our evenings thinking about what Australia might look like in 2040 or 2050. But avoiding difficult conversations does not reduce the underlying risks. It simply leaves us less prepared for them.
An national conversation of this kind should also be more than experts telling Australians what is coming. Sense-making itself needs to be distributed. People need opportunities to consider what these changes mean for their own places, what they value and want to protect, what they may need to change, and what capabilities already exist around them. Some of these conversations should happen nationally, but many will be far more meaningful at the level of cities, regions, towns, neighbourhoods and particular industries.
There is also a practical question about the information available to support these conversations. We need more consistent and accessible information about future climate risks, but knowing where flooding or extreme heat may occur is only part of the picture. A business also needs to understand what happens if its suppliers, workforce or electricity supply are disrupted. A community needs to understand how the same event could affect healthcare, transport, communications and access to essential goods. National risk information could become considerably more useful if it helped people understand these interdependencies alongside the physical hazards themselves, and identify the capabilities available to manage them.
If the risks we are preparing for are systemic and capable of overwhelming individual institutions, then our response cannot consist simply of making each existing institution somewhat better prepared. We also need to think about how capability is distributed across society as a whole.
Building distributed national capability
This is why I think the next stage of Australia's resilience agenda could be understood as building distributed national capability.
By this I mean deliberately building useful capability across many parts and levels of society, rather than concentrating our capacity to prepare for, respond to and recover from disruption within a relatively small number of institutions. Households, communities, businesses, schools, health services, emergency services, infrastructure providers, civil society and governments would each hold different forms of capability appropriate to their roles and circumstances. They would not be expected to do the same things, nor to manage alone. The objective would be for enough capability to exist throughout the system that people and organisations can manage what reasonably sits within their reach, support others when needed, continue essential functions when parts of the wider system are disrupted, and draw on larger networks when their own capacity is exceeded. Much of this capability already exists; the task is to recognise it, strengthen it, connect it and address the places where it is currently absent or too weak.
One way of imagining this is as a series of resilient cells nested within larger networks. Households sit within neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods within towns and cities, local businesses and community organisations within those places, and communities within wider systems of councils, regions, states and the nation. Emergency services, health providers, infrastructure operators, governments and civil society intersect across all of these levels rather than sitting neatly within any one of them. No cell would need to become self-sufficient, which would be neither realistic nor desirable but each would need enough capability to function independently for a period and to support others where it can, with wider networks to call on beyond that.
(Picture by Getty Images)
Six principles for a more resilient Australia
If distributed national capability describes broadly what we are trying to build, we also need some principles for how that capability should be organised. Six seem particularly important to me: redundancy, diversity, modularity, subsidiarity, interoperability and adaptive learning.
Redundancy means accepting that some spare capacity and duplication are useful. A second communications system, an alternative transport route, additional water storage, spare electricity generation or another organisation capable of performing an essential function may appear inefficient during normal times but become invaluable during a crisis. The question is not how much duplication we can afford everywhere, but where the consequences of failure are sufficiently serious that maintaining alternatives is worth the cost.
Diversity means avoiding excessive dependence on a single technology, organisation, supplier, source of knowledge or way of solving a problem. A society with different sources of energy, food, information, skills and leadership has more options when circumstances change. This applies to knowledge as well: professional expertise, local experience, First Nations knowledge and community relationships bring different capabilities, and a resilient system should be able to draw upon all of them.
Modularity is about preventing disruption in one part of a system from automatically disabling everything else. A neighbourhood that can communicate locally when telecommunications fail, a community with some distributed electricity generation, or a regional food system retaining some local production may retain essential functions while the larger system is under pressure. The challenge is to remain connected enough to benefit from larger networks without becoming entirely dependent upon their continuous operation.
Subsidiarity means that decisions and capabilities should generally sit at the lowest level at which they can be handled effectively and adequately resourced, while higher levels provide what cannot reasonably be provided locally. A neighbourhood should not wait for Canberra to determine how it checks on vulnerable residents during a heatwave, just as a neighbourhood cannot build a national telecommunications network or finance the reconstruction of a highway. Some capabilities properly belong with households and communities, others with councils and regions, and others with states or the Commonwealth. Distributing capability should not become an excuse for simply transferring responsibility downwards without the resources required to exercise it.
Interoperability means ensuring that these different parts of the system can work together when they need to. A distributed model will necessarily involve organisations, communities and systems that operate differently, and there is value in preserving that diversity. But they still need ways to communicate, exchange information, request and offer resources, and coordinate during disruption. That requires enough common protocols, relationships and interfaces for separate capabilities to become part of a larger response when circumstances demand it.
Finally, adaptive learning recognises that the risks themselves will continue to change, as will technologies, communities and the systems upon which we depend. A resilient system cannot simply be designed and then assumed to remain fit for purpose. It needs to learn from disasters, exercises, near misses and local experimentation, update its assumptions as evidence changes, and allow useful innovations in one place to spread elsewhere. This is particularly important when historical experience may become a progressively less reliable guide to future conditions.
Taken together, these principles are intended to create enough capability and alternative pathways at different levels that essential functions can continue, assistance can move towards wherever capacity has been exceeded, and the wider system can adjust as circumstances change.
Two further considerations need to run through all six: equity and trust. Risks and capabilities are not evenly distributed, and a distributed model will only deepen existing inequalities if communities with fewer resources are given greater responsibility without greater support. At the same time, even a well-designed system will struggle if the people and institutions within it do not trust one another sufficiently to share information, recognise different forms of knowledge and authority, and cooperate when it matters. Neither equity nor trust can therefore be treated as an optional addition to resilience; both affect whether distributed capability will actually function in practice.
Building capability where people live
Distributed capability begins, in some respects, at the household level. The more households can manage through the early stages of a disruption, the more capacity remains elsewhere for people who need greater assistance. That does not mean expecting every household to become self-sufficient or turning preparedness into an individual responsibility. But there is a reasonable level of basic capability that many households could progressively develop: understanding the risks where they live, having relevant plans and some essential supplies, knowing how they would manage during a prolonged electricity or telecommunications outage, having access to reliable information, and considering the particular needs of those for whom they are responsible.
Household resilience is also highly uneven. A family with financial resources, storage space, a vehicle, solar panels and a battery, good health and strong social networks begins from a very different position from someone living alone in insecure housing, dependent on electrically powered medical equipment or without the money to maintain several days of supplies. A national approach to household preparedness therefore needs to combine reasonable expectations of individual preparedness with targeted support for people who face greater barriers or risks. And households themselves should not be understood as isolated units. One of their most important sources of resilience is often the people around them: family, friends and neighbours who can share information, equipment, transport, skills and care.
This is where household resilience begins to connect with resilience at the level of place. One practical expression of building distributed national capability would be to progressively establish some form of minimum community resilience baseline wherever Australians live.
I use the word "community" fairly loosely here because I don't think there is a single geographical unit that makes sense everywhere. In a regional area it might be a town, village, valley or district. In a city it could be a neighbourhood, several streets, an apartment complex or another area that makes sense socially and geographically. What matters is less the administrative boundary than whether people recognise the place, have relationships within it and can reasonably organise at that scale.
At a minimum, there should be some shared understanding of the major risks facing that place, as well as the strengths and resources already present. People might know which residents could require additional support during a heatwave, flood, fire or extended outage; who has useful skills, equipment or local knowledge; where people could gather; how communication might continue if normal telecommunications failed; and what would happen to essential needs such as water, food, health, energy, transport and safety if normal services were disrupted for several days.
Much of this already exists informally, particularly in regional and rural Australia. People know who owns a tractor or generator, which road will flood first, which neighbour is a nurse, who lives alone and who has a large water tank. During disasters these informal networks often become extremely important, yet we still have a tendency to discover and rely upon them during the emergency itself rather than systematically nurturing them beforehand.
These local cells of resilience would not all need to look the same, nor would they necessarily need to be created specifically for resilience. Some might be incorporated community organisations with established governance and funding; others might be informal networks of neighbours who simply know and support one another. Some communities may choose to establish groups specifically focused on preparedness and resilience, while elsewhere the same functions might sit within a neighbourhood association, Landcare group, sporting club, faith community, school network, cultural organisation or another existing part of community life. Whatever the organisational form, what matters is whether useful relationships and capabilities exist and people know how to mobilise them, and whether there are ways for these local networks to connect with councils, emergency services and the wider systems around them.
The role of government here would be to enable rather than attempt to manage every relationship: providing good risk information, funding, training, communications tools and connections with councils and emergency services, while leaving considerable room for communities to determine how this works locally. There is a danger of assuming that formalisation is synonymous with capability. It isn't always. Community resilience depends heavily on relationships, trust, improvisation and local knowledge, and these do not necessarily become stronger simply because they are incorporated into another administrative structure.
Local governments could play a particularly important role in this, not necessarily by taking responsibility for every aspect of community resilience, but by helping to connect the different capabilities that exist within their areas. Councils are well placed to convene local businesses, community organisations, emergency services and infrastructure providers around shared risks and priorities. Yet their capacity to do so varies enormously, and many already face considerable financial and operational pressures. If we expect councils to help develop this wider resilience architecture, they will need the resources, expertise and institutional support to fulfil that role.
At the same time, localism creates an important equity problem. Some communities have much more money, time, professional expertise and social capital than others, while many communities with high exposure to climate risk are also dealing with significant disadvantage. Any national model would therefore need to be deliberately redistributive, with more support directed towards places where the risks are high and existing resources are limited. Otherwise resilience itself risks becoming another dimension of inequality.
Cities require their own thinking
I am particularly interested in how this approach would translate into Australian cities, because some of our thinking about community resilience has understandably developed through experiences of bushfires, floods and cyclones in regional areas.
Urban environments have different strengths and vulnerabilities. Someone living in a high-rise apartment may know very few neighbours while being highly dependent upon electricity, lifts, telecommunications, electronic payments, public transport and complex supply chains. Their capacity to store food or water may be limited, and extended power failures during extreme heat could create serious problems very quickly. At the same time, cities contain enormous concentrations of capability. Doctors, nurses, engineers, tradespeople, businesses, universities, community organisations and millions of people live within relatively small geographical areas.
Rather than assuming that cities lack community resilience, the opportunity is partly to identify and connect what we might call latent capability: people, places, skills, equipment, relationships and organisations that already exist within a city but are not ordinarily thought of as part of its resilience architecture. A school, for example, is primarily a place of education, but may also have large indoor spaces, kitchens, toilets, communications systems, useful skills and strong relationships with hundreds of local families. Sporting clubs, apartment buildings, libraries, faith organisations and local businesses may similarly hold resources, knowledge or networks that become valuable during disruption, while individual residents may have medical or trade skills, languages, equipment or detailed knowledge of their neighbourhood that never appears on an emergency management map.
The task is to become better at recognising which existing capabilities could usefully contribute during different kinds of disruption, and at creating the relationships that allow them to be mobilised when needed, without turning every organisation or citizen into an emergency responder. Apartment buildings could have resilience arrangements alongside their fire plans. Schools, libraries and community centres could play a greater role during heatwaves and prolonged outages. Councils could support neighbourhood communication systems, local cooling spaces and ways of checking on vulnerable people. In many cases, building distributed capability may therefore involve connecting and enabling what is already present rather than creating entirely new structures.
The businesses that keep communities functioning
I also think we need to broaden our understanding of which organisations matter during a prolonged disruption. A pharmacy may be a private business, but when the roads are cut and people cannot obtain medication its role becomes rather more significant than the term "business continuity" suggests. The same can be true of a GP clinic, supermarket, mechanic, hardware store, petrol station, freight operator or local tradesperson. At larger scales, banks, telecommunications companies, energy providers, supermarkets, freight networks and payment systems provide services upon which almost every aspect of contemporary life depends.
We already recognise the importance of critical infrastructure, but there is a more local layer that I think deserves attention. It may be useful to identify what we could call community-critical businesses: organisations whose continued operation makes a material difference to whether a community can function during disruption.
That could lead to practical discussions about backup electricity, alternative communications, supply arrangements, workforce continuity or mutual support between businesses. It could also allow communities to understand in advance where their dependencies lie rather than discovering them once the system begins to fail.
This would have to be approached carefully. Small businesses already operate under considerable pressure, and it would be unreasonable simply to impose another layer of obligations upon them in the name of community resilience. If a business is being asked to maintain additional capability because that capability provides a public benefit during crises, there is a reasonable argument for public support, whether through grants, incentives, procurement arrangements or other mechanisms.
Emergency services and a much wider pool of capability
Australia will clearly continue to need strong and well-resourced emergency services, particularly if the events they face become larger, more complex and more prolonged.
There is still considerable scope to strengthen the formal emergency management system itself. That includes better planning for concurrent and cascading events; stronger interoperability between agencies and jurisdictions; more resilient communications and logistics; clearer arrangements for sharing personnel and resources when several regions are under pressure; and exercises that test systems under conditions of partial failure rather than assuming communications, transport, staffing and supply chains will continue to function normally.
We also need to confront the sustainability of the volunteer models upon which much of Australia's emergency response capability depends. Traditional models requiring substantial and ongoing commitments of time are becoming harder for many people to sustain alongside work, family and other responsibilities, while climate change is likely to increase the frequency and duration of the events for which those same volunteers are required. This does not mean abandoning volunteer-based emergency services, which remain an extraordinary national asset, but it does mean considering more flexible forms of participation, better support for volunteers and their employers, and a broader mix of professional, retained, reserve and volunteer capability. That could include people who contribute occasionally rather than weekly, trained reservists who can be activated during major events, locally based people with particular skills who can be called upon when needed, and pathways that allow people to move between different levels of involvement as their work, family circumstances and availability change over the course of their lives.
More generally, emergency management needs to become better at learning across disasters, including from communities themselves, so that inquiries and after-action reviews result in institutional change rather than repeatedly identifying similar problems. As climate risks intensify, emergency management will increasingly need to operate not only as a response system, but as part of a broader architecture of preparedness, adaptation and continuity.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we still tend to think about emergency capability in fairly binary terms: there are emergency services, including their formal volunteers, and then there is everybody else. In reality, there could be a much broader continuum of capability. At one end are highly trained professionals, supported by formal volunteers, retained personnel and reserves. Beyond them could sit trained community responders with useful skills and a recognised role but without the commitment expected of an SES or rural fire service volunteer, followed by a much larger population with basic preparedness, first aid and emergency skills. People could move between these levels at different stages of their lives.
This would shift the question from how we recruit more volunteers into existing organisations to how we progressively increase the emergency capability of the population as a whole. Different levels would carry different responsibilities, training requirements, protections and relationships with formal emergency management, without blurring operational command or encouraging untrained people to undertake dangerous tasks.
This is all the more important because there is a practical limit to how much formal response capacity can ever be provided. When a sufficiently large area is affected, or several regions are dealing with emergencies at once, there will inevitably be periods when professional and formal volunteer services cannot reach everyone who needs assistance. As the Bushfire Royal Commission stated explicitly in 2020, “in significant emergencies and disasters, emergency management personnel do not, and never will, have the capability and capacity to solve the emergency threat for every individual at risk.”
We know what happens during those periods because we have seen it repeatedly. Neighbours support one another, farmers bring machinery, people with boats help with rescues, businesses provide equipment, and local organisations begin coordinating food, information, shelter and practical support. Much of this emerges spontaneously.
There are legitimate reasons why emergency organisations can find spontaneous volunteering difficult. Competence, liability, insurance, safety and command all matter, and poorly coordinated assistance can create additional problems. I don't think we should romanticise informal response. But there is an enormous space between being an entirely unprepared member of the public and becoming a formal SES or rural fire service volunteer, and Australia could explore that space much more creatively.
Shorter forms of training, community responder programmes, micro-credentials, emergency reserves and more flexible forms of volunteering could create clearer pathways for people who want to be useful without making the considerable commitment required by formal emergency-service membership. NSW is already beginning to recognise spontaneous volunteering more formally, and there is an opportunity to think much more systematically about what this could become.
Supporting the people who step forward
If we want more people to contribute during and after disasters, there is also a practical question about what we are asking them to carry. It is one thing to celebrate community responders; it is another to expect them to absorb the financial, legal and personal costs of doing that work. Someone who spends days or weeks helping their community should not also have to navigate uncertainty about injury insurance or liability, while someone who steps away from employment or a business for weeks to undertake essential community work may simply be unable to donate that labour indefinitely.
There are overseas examples worth examining. Spain's national volunteering law gives formal volunteers a right to insurance against accident and illness arising directly from their volunteer activity, with the cost borne by the volunteer organisation; civil liability coverage also applies where sector-specific law requires it. There is also an interesting Swedish example: volunteers registered with the SMS Lifesaver programme receive free accident insurance that activates automatically when they accept an emergency call-out.
I am less interested in importing any one of these models than in the principle behind them. If we want people to step forward during emergencies, we should make it easy and safe for them to do so. Australia could develop a mechanism through which recognised community responders are automatically, or almost automatically, covered for accident, injury and appropriate liability when they register or are activated during a declared emergency. The administrative burden should sit primarily with the system rather than with people trying to help.
The same question applies to income. For many forms of volunteering, remaining unpaid is entirely appropriate. But during major disasters the distinction between volunteering and essential civic work can become less obvious. Someone helping at a community hub for an afternoon is in a very different position from somebody who spends six or twelve weeks coordinating volunteers, supplies or support for vulnerable residents while their normal employment or business is put on hold.
It may therefore be worth exploring a temporary community responder allowance during major disasters for people undertaking substantial and recognised community response roles. Australia already has mechanisms for temporary income support following declared disasters, so the administrative concept has precedents to build on.
There would need to be safeguards, and I would be wary of monetising every act of neighbourly assistance or creating a new class of quasi-professional responders who inadvertently displace established emergency services. But if we need people to undertake significant civic work for weeks at a time, then expecting them simply to absorb the lost income may exclude precisely the people whose skills and local relationships we need.
Disasters do not end when emergency services demobilise. Recovery can take years, and some of the hardest work happens long after public attention has moved elsewhere: helping people navigate government systems, supporting those experiencing trauma, rebuilding local organisations, helping businesses recover and restoring social connections.
Where organisations are demonstrably performing important recovery and resilience functions, there is a strong case for multi-year funding, perhaps over three to five years, with appropriate accountability but enough certainty to employ people, retain knowledge and maintain relationships. The precise duration will obviously depend upon the disaster and the place, but funding arrangements should bear some relationship to the actual timescale of recovery.
This raises a broader question about how we value civic contribution during disasters. We regularly describe community responders as heroic or indispensable, but recognition without practical support can become rather hollow. If community capability is part of Australia's resilience architecture, then insurance, income protection, training, wellbeing support and sustained organisational funding need to be considered part of that architecture too.
Towards an Australian model of civil protection
The broader question is what institutional architecture might help connect all of this capability. One possibility worth exploring is whether Australia needs its own conception of civil protection.
I do not mean importing a European model wholesale, nor creating another large bureaucracy. Australia has its own geography, institutions, culture and traditions of volunteering, and any approach would need to grow from those realities. Rather, I mean developing a clearer national framework through which the capabilities that exist across emergency services, governments, businesses, civil society, communities and the wider population can be recognised, strengthened and connected.
Such a framework could help clarify roles before crises occur, establish common expectations where useful, connect different forms of capability, and provide some of the practical foundations, such as training, recognition, insurance, information and coordination—that allow a distributed system to function. It could also help identify places where capability is weak, populations are poorly supported or responsibility remains unclear.
Importantly, civil protection should not be understood simply as an extension of emergency management. If the risks Australia faces increasingly involve prolonged heat, infrastructure disruption, supply-chain problems, health impacts, displacement and cascading failures across several systems, then the relevant capabilities extend well beyond those traditionally mobilised during fires, floods or cyclones. Schools, health services, councils, infrastructure providers, businesses and community organisations may all become part of maintaining essential functions during disruption.
Seen in this way, civil protection could provide one institutional expression of the wider idea of distributed national capability. Its purpose would be to create enough connective tissue around that capability, without centralising it, that capabilities held in different parts of society can reinforce one another when required.
That distinction is important because a distributed system cannot simply be built by drawing everything into formal structures. Some community capabilities derive their value precisely from being local, relational, flexible and able to improvise. This creates another challenge: how formal institutions and informal community systems can work together without requiring one to become like the other.
Connecting formal and informal capability
Professional organisations and community networks bring different capabilities to disruption. Emergency services and public institutions bring technical expertise, equipment, statutory authority, established procedures and command structures. Communities bring detailed knowledge of place, existing relationships, diverse skills and an ability to improvise around circumstances that may not have been anticipated in formal plans. Businesses and civil society organisations often sit somewhere between these worlds.
But we need to be candid about some of the cultural differences involved. Emergency management agencies and other public institutions are generally hierarchical organisations. They need clear lines of authority, accountability, procedures, performance measures and ultimately people who are responsible for decisions. Community groups and networks often operate very differently. They can be horizontal, informal, distributed and sometimes quite messy, with leadership shifting between people depending on the circumstances. But that does not mean they are unsophisticated. Some community networks develop remarkably complex ways of sharing information, making decisions, mobilising people and solving problems precisely because they are less constrained by formal structures.
Conversely, I have also seen highly structured emergency management systems become paralysed by their own processes, or make decisions with catastrophic consequences. Formal structures can provide accountability, expertise and coordination, but they are no guarantee of good decisions.
In my experience, this difference is still not always well understood. I have encountered emergency management and institutional staff who speak sincerely about the importance of community knowledge and community-led approaches, while still relating to communities from an implicitly paternalistic position: the institution remains the expert, while the community is there to be consulted, educated, engaged or managed. I don't think that relationship will be sufficient for what lies ahead.
Community networks and horizontal structures have their own weaknesses and conflicts too. Informal networks can exclude people, reproduce existing inequalities, circulate poor information, become dominated by particular personalities or simply lack the technical expertise required for some decisions. We need both forms of organisation, and we need them to work together with a much clearer respect for the different capabilities, constraints and forms of knowledge each brings.
Indeed, some of the value may lie precisely in their differences. Two systems organised differently are less likely to share all the same strengths, blind spots and points of failure. This is itself a form of diversity and redundancy. A formal system may struggle where an informal network can adapt quickly; a community network may reach the limits of what relationships and improvisation can achieve precisely where specialist expertise, equipment, statutory authority or large-scale coordination become essential.
That requires more than institutions acknowledging that communities have a role to play. We need to genuinely recognise that formal and informal systems perform different functions and that, particularly during large and complex disasters, we are likely to need both. The objective should be to become much better at creating interfaces between the two, leaving community networks informal and leaving intact the accountability and command structures that formal emergency management requires.
In practice, that could mean joint exercises involving emergency services, councils, community organisations and local businesses; established liaison points before disasters occur; ways for communities to both receive and provide verified information; mechanisms through which local groups can request resources or offer capability; and meaningful community participation in planning, exercises and post-disaster reviews. Training could also work in both directions: communities learning more about how formal emergency systems operate, while professionals develop a better understanding of local networks, knowledge and ways of organising.
None of this can be created during the emergency itself. The most important infrastructure connecting formal and informal systems may ultimately be trust, and trust develops through relationships, transparency, reliability and the experience of doing things together. If distributed national capability is to work in practice, we need to invest not only in the capabilities themselves, but in the relationships that allow very different parts of society to recognise one another, communicate and work together when conditions become difficult.
Infrastructure for the climate we are moving into
All of this also rests, of course, upon physical and digital systems. Australia's electricity networks, telecommunications, water systems, roads, hospitals, housing, transport networks and food systems were largely designed using assumptions derived from historical conditions. Those assumptions are becoming increasingly unreliable. Climate adaptation therefore needs to become much more deeply embedded in infrastructure planning, land-use decisions, building standards, asset management and public investment. The relevant question is increasingly whether infrastructure is likely to continue functioning under the conditions it may experience during its lifetime, which meeting current standards does not guarantee.
In some cases that will mean strengthening existing infrastructure. In others it may involve decentralisation or alternative systems: backup communications, distributed energy, additional water storage, alternative transport routes, strategic stocks distributed locally or other forms of spare capacity.
These choices inevitably involve trade-offs between efficiency, affordability and resilience. Infrastructure planning will increasingly need to consider what happens when several interconnected systems are disrupted at once, alongside the probability of individual failures.
Our dependence on ecosystems
There is another dimension of resilience that I think remains too easy to separate from discussions about communities and infrastructure, and one that modern urban life can make particularly easy to overlook: our dependence on functioning ecosystems.
Our food systems rely upon healthy soils, water and pollination; catchments and vegetation influence water cycles and temperatures; wetlands and floodplains absorb water; and coastal ecosystems can reduce erosion and storm impacts. In cities, trees and waterways can materially affect heat, flooding and human wellbeing. A degraded catchment affects the resilience of a water system, degraded soils affect food production, and the loss of urban vegetation or wetlands can directly increase exposure to heat and flooding.
Restoring ecosystems, improving soil health, protecting biodiversity, reconnecting habitat and regenerating damaged landscapes should therefore form part of how we think about the resilience of human communities.
There is also a more fundamental point here. Much of our language around disasters still positions nature as something outside society from which human settlements need to be protected. Yet our communities, economies and institutions exist inside living systems and remain dependent upon them in ways that technological sophistication sometimes makes easy to forget.
If we are serious about interdependence, it needs to include our dependence upon the natural world as well as our dependence upon one another.
Preparing children for the world they will inherit
There is also a generational aspect to this.
If we expect today's children to spend their adult lives in a period of greater climate and ecological disruption, then it seems reasonable to give them some of the knowledge and practical capability they will need to navigate that world.
I don't mean frightening children with bleak visions of the future, nor do I think disaster preparedness needs to become another subject competing for space in an already crowded curriculum.
Some of this is very practical: first aid, understanding local hazards, knowing what to do during extreme heat, fire, flood or a prolonged power outage, learning how to communicate and organise when normal systems are disrupted, and developing basic practical skills that many of us have gradually lost. Some of it is ecological: understanding water, soils, food systems, biodiversity, climate and the ecosystems upon which our lives depend. And some of it is social: learning how groups make decisions, resolve disagreement, cooperate under pressure and look after people who may need additional support.
There is also an opportunity here to draw much more seriously on First Nations knowledge and relationships with Country, while recognising the diversity and specificity of those knowledge systems rather than treating them as another generic resource to be incorporated into a national curriculum.
Done well, this would not need to sit within a subject called "disaster preparedness". It could be woven through science, geography, health, civics, outdoor education and practical learning, while schools themselves become more connected to the communities around them. Students might map local risks and assets, learn from emergency services and Elders, participate in community projects or help think through how their neighbourhood would support vulnerable people during a heatwave.
Over a generation, this could contribute to something much larger than preparedness. It could help create a population for whom understanding risk, caring for place, knowing how to help others and participating in community life are ordinary capabilities rather than specialist activities acquired only after something has gone wrong.
Resilience has limits
There is also a risk that the language of resilience encourages us to believe that everything can continue more or less as it is if we simply become sufficiently well prepared. I don't think that is realistic.
There will be infrastructure that should be strengthened, buildings that can be adapted and communities that can reduce their risks considerably. There will also be places where the cost and danger of maintaining existing patterns of development increase to a point where much harder decisions need to be considered, places that will become increasingly uninhabitable.
Some infrastructure may eventually need to move and some forms of land use may cease to make sense. In some locations, adaptation may involve changes to settlement itself. In other words, we need to include in our national conversation considerations about which parts of Australia we can continue protecting, and which ones we may ultimately need to move away from.
These are extraordinarily difficult questions because places are not interchangeable assets. People have histories, livelihoods, identities and relationships attached to them. For First Nations communities, connection to Country carries dimensions that cannot be understood through conventional calculations of property value and risk. There are also mortgages, insurance markets, local government finances and fundamental questions of who bears losses and who is expected to move.
Indeed, a place may become increasingly difficult to sustain long before it becomes physically uninhabitable. Rising insurance premiums, declining property values, repeated business interruptions and the gradual withdrawal of essential services can undermine the economic and social foundations of a community. These pressures may also reinforce one another: businesses become reluctant to invest, employment opportunities diminish, and households with the means to leave do so, potentially leaving those with fewer resources in increasingly vulnerable circumstances. Adaptation policy therefore needs to consider not only the physical risks facing particular places, but also the conditions that allow them to remain socially and economically viable.
There is no simple answer to any of this, but a serious national conversation about resilience cannot avoid it indefinitely. Distributed capability can help us withstand, adapt to and recover from disruption. It cannot make every place permanently habitable, protect every asset indefinitely or substitute for reducing the underlying causes of climate change.
Turning distributed national capability into practice
Many of the capabilities, institutions, networks and policies already exist. The challenge is to bring them together more deliberately around the idea of distributed national capability, identify where important gaps remain, and progressively strengthen the whole system.
This will require institutional arrangements that endure beyond individual governments and electoral cycles. A legislated cycle of national risk assessment, adaptation planning and public reporting could provide some of that continuity, particularly if it connects Commonwealth priorities with state, regional and local implementation. But I would go a step further. Alongside assessing risks and reporting on adaptation investments, we should be asking whether the capabilities we need are actually developing, where significant gaps remain, and whether different parts of the system can function together when tested. The objective should be public accountability for resilience outcomes, not simply for the activities undertaken in its name.
I think this suggests at least seven practical priorities.
1. Have an honest national conversation about what we are preparing for.
The starting point should be a clearer shared understanding of the risks Australia is likely to face and the kinds of disruption we are preparing for. The National Climate Risk Assessment provides an important evidence base, but this cannot remain a conversation among governments and experts. We need sustained national, regional and local conversations about what changing conditions could mean for different places, what people value and want to protect, what capabilities we will need, and where adaptation may eventually require difficult choices about infrastructure, land use or relocation. The purpose is to allow people and institutions to make better decisions in the face of plausible futures, since no one can predict the future precisely.
2. Establish a minimum baseline of household and local capability.
There should be a reasonable minimum level of preparedness that we seek to develop across Australian households and communities, while recognising that risks, resources and circumstances vary enormously. This does not require creating the same structure everywhere. In some places capability will sit within formal resilience organisations; elsewhere it may be embedded within existing community groups or informal networks.
3. Strengthen the essential systems on which society depends.
Distributed capability will achieve little if the systems supporting it are themselves extremely brittle. Essential infrastructure needs to be planned for increasingly severe and concurrent disruption. This includes identifying community-critical businesses and organisations whose continued operation matters disproportionately during crises, and considering where redundancy, decentralisation, alternative systems or additional spare capacity are justified. It also means recognising functioning ecosystems as part of this essential infrastructure.
4. Build a much wider pool of civic capability.
Australia should progressively increase the number of people able to contribute usefully before, during and after disruption. That means strengthening professional and volunteer emergency services while creating more flexible pathways between being a formal responder and an entirely untrained member of the public. Community responder programmes, reserves, shorter training, micro-credentials and basic preparedness and first-aid skills could all form part of a wider continuum of capability. An Australian model of civil protection could provide a framework through which this broader civic capability is recognised, supported and connected without turning every citizen into an emergency responder or transferring government responsibilities onto unpaid communities.
5. Build the interfaces between different forms of capability.
A distributed system is only useful if its different parts can connect when required. Governments, emergency services, infrastructure providers, businesses, community organisations and informal networks need established ways to communicate, share information, request and offer resources and work alongside one another. Some of this requires technical interoperability, but much of it is relational. Joint exercises, established liaison arrangements, two-way information flows and genuine participation in planning and reviews can build familiarity and trust before a crisis occurs. The objective should be to make the differences between these actors easier to bridge when circumstances require them to work together.
6. Clarify responsibility, authority and resourcing across levels.
Distributed capability should not mean distributing responsibility indiscriminately. We need greater clarity about what households can reasonably be expected to do, what communities and local organisations can provide, what belongs with councils and regions, and what requires the resources, authority and scale of state or Commonwealth government. The same applies to businesses, infrastructure providers and other institutions whose decisions affect public resilience. Governments retain essential roles in areas such as land-use planning, building standards, infrastructure, redistribution, risk information and large-scale coordination, while allowing sufficient local autonomy for places to adapt and improvise.
7. Measure, test and continuously improve capability.
Finally, we need to become better at assessing whether resilience actually exists rather than simply measuring the activities undertaken in its name. The number of plans written, workshops delivered, committees established or grants distributed tells us relatively little about how a system will perform under stress. We need meaningful measures of capability, exercises that test systems under realistic conditions of partial failure, stronger learning from disasters and near misses, and mechanisms through which successful local experimentation can spread elsewhere. The risks will continue to change, so the system itself must remain capable of learning and adapting. That might mean assessing whether a community can effectively communicate during an extended outage, whether essential local businesses can maintain critical services, or whether councils, emergency services and community organisations can successfully coordinate during a realistic exercise.
These seven priorities should not be treated as another checklist or national programme to be implemented uniformly across Australia. The six principles discussed earlier—redundancy, diversity, modularity, subsidiarity, interoperability and adaptive learning—provide a way of thinking about how each should be designed and applied. Equity and trust must run through all of them. A distributed model that gives greater responsibility to people and places without addressing unequal resources will simply reproduce existing disadvantage, while a system whose different parts do not trust one another will struggle to function regardless of how carefully its structures have been designed.
The aim is therefore not to construct a perfectly ordered national resilience system. It is to progressively build greater capability at multiple levels, stronger connections between those capabilities, and enough diversity and redundancy that the whole system can continue to function when individual parts are under pressure or fail. Distributed national capability would inevitably be somewhat uneven, overlapping and messy. Given the uncertainty of what lies ahead, that may be a strength rather than a weakness.
Paying for resilience
There is, of course, an obvious question running through all of this: who pays?
There will be no single answer. Some investments belong within ordinary infrastructure budgets and some will require specific Commonwealth, state or local government expenditure. Businesses will reasonably carry some costs themselves, particularly where resilience is integral to their own operations, while governments may need to support capabilities that provide a wider public benefit. There may also be roles for insurers, infrastructure operators, institutional investors and other forms of adaptation finance.
It may be useful to distinguish between three broad forms of investment. The first concerns physical and ecological assets, including infrastructure, buildings, distributed energy and ecosystem restoration. The second concerns human, social and organisational capability: preparedness, leadership, training, community networks and business continuity. The third concerns the relationships and arrangements that allow these capabilities to work together, including shared information, coordination, alternative supply systems and joint exercises. Different financing mechanisms will be appropriate for each. Some investments may attract private capital, particularly where they generate identifiable financial returns. Others will primarily produce wider public benefits and require sustained public funding. We should be careful not to privilege what is easiest to finance or measure over what is most important to resilience.
I think it is important, however, that we do not begin from the assumption that meaningful investment in resilience is somehow inherently unaffordable.
In Unspeakable, Richard Hil and I discussed the Australia Institute’s estimates that Australian governments provided $14.5 billion in assistance to fossil-fuel producers and major users in 2023–24, with longer-term commitments at the time estimated at around $65 billion. The Institute calculated that this was around sixteen times the then-balance of Australia's Disaster Ready Fund.
I don't raise those figures because I think every form of fossil-fuel assistance could simply be cancelled tomorrow and transferred into resilience. The economics and politics are considerably more complicated than that. I mention them because they put questions of affordability into perspective: budgets inevitably express choices about what societies value, what risks they are prepared to carry and what they are willing to invest in preventing. If we conclude that maintaining the resilience of Australian communities, infrastructure and ecosystems is becoming a significant national challenge, then over time our expenditure should begin to reflect that judgement.
There are many possible ways of doing this. Governments could expand dedicated resilience and adaptation funds, provide longer-term recovery agreements, co-invest with insurers and critical infrastructure providers, support community-critical businesses to maintain additional capacity, and embed resilience requirements into ordinary spending on infrastructure, health, education, housing and the environment.
The latter may be particularly important. If resilience remains primarily a discrete programme sitting somewhere within emergency management, it will always be competing for a relatively small pool of money. If instead we understand resilience as part of the continuing functionality of Australian society, then a much wider range of public and private investment becomes relevant.
The question of how much Australia can afford to spend on disaster resilience therefore needs to be asked alongside another, which is what repeated disruption, infrastructure failure, declining insurability, prolonged recovery and damaged ecosystems will cost if we do not invest sufficiently beforehand.
Making resilience part of ordinary life
Ultimately, I think resilience needs to become a more ordinary part of how we live in Australia. Learning how to prepare for disruption should feel no more politically contentious or culturally unusual than learning to swim or acquiring basic first-aid skills. We should understand the risks where we live, know something about the people around us, have some capacity to manage when the systems we depend upon are disrupted, and know where we fit within the wider networks that can help when our own capacity is exceeded.
The deeper idea running through all of this is interdependence. None of us is self-sufficient, and that holds for households, communities, businesses, governments and even nations. We depend upon one another and upon infrastructure, institutions and living systems that are themselves increasingly exposed to disruption. The relevant question is therefore whether we can make those relationships less brittle, since independence from disruption is not available to any of us.
That, for me, is what building distributed national capability is ultimately about. It means accepting that resilience cannot sit primarily within emergency services, governments or any other single part of society. It needs to exist, in different forms and to different degrees, throughout the systems and relationships that allow society to function.
We cannot know precisely what Australia will face over the coming decades. But we know enough to re-organise ourselves more deliberately. My hope is that, over the coming decade, we collectively make the choices that leave us with an Australia in which resilience is less something we activate when disaster arrives and more something embedded in the way our communities, institutions, economies and landscapes function every day.
Need help applying these ideas inside your organisation? I work with boards and executive teams to build crisis-ready capability across leadership, culture and systems.