The future of resilience

Last week, the Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Resilience released its long-awaited report, Boots on the ground: raising resilience. It’s an excellent summary of input from across the disaster-response community in Australia and makes many sensible recommendations for advancing disaster resilience. 

It does not, however, solve the core problem that it identifies: how to displace the ADF’s role in anything but last-resort domestic disaster response. Until that problem is solved, the requirement for ADF support during emergencies will continue to increase—leaving it distracted from its core defence mission amid rising geopolitical uncertainty. 

What Australia needs is a future disaster-response capacity commensurate with rapidly accelerating climate impacts—driven by an intergenerational strategy for climate-amplified disaster response. 

To do so, governments must give emerging generations a seat at the table in designing a future disaster-response force that they will lead. This strategy must be complementary to the forthcoming National Adaptation Plan and ongoing energy transition efforts. Rather than mandating sacrifice through inaction and poor preparation, governments should invest in and give young people hope for a safe climate-resilient future that they can build.

On the select committee’s core finding: this is far from the first time that the ADF’s role in domestic disaster response has been flagged as a challenge. The issue was acknowledged in the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and the 2024 National Defence Strategy, both of which pointed out the operational trade-offs involved in the concurrency of the ADF’s increasing engagement in domestic disaster response and its core national defence missions. ASPI commented on this with the DSR’s release last year, but little has changed in public decision-making since then, despite rising disaster intensity and frequency driven by climate change. 

This defence and disaster-response concurrency challenge is also not unique to Australia. The Center for Climate and Security in the US has been tracking the rising number of military responses to climate hazards around the globe. NATO’s latest annual Climate change and security impact assessment report demonstrated how its strategic competitors, Russia and China, face the same climate-amplified disaster-response and adaptation challenges as allied militaries. In large part, the effectiveness of future militaries will depend on their ability to decouple themselves from disaster response. 

Rising disaster-response needs also drive Australia’s support to partners in the Indo-Pacific and further abroad. Australia’s proposal to establish the Pacific Response Group (PRG) reflects this: a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief focused initiative between the militaries of Australia, Fiji, France, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Tonga. The PRG may play an increasingly important role in the years to come, including by helping to meet Australia’s disaster-response commitments to Tuvalu under the Falepili Union, if Tuvalu were to request a multinational response. 

International responses also eat into domestic non-ADF disaster-response capacity. There’s a longstanding tradition of countries sharing disaster-response capacity. For example, Australian firefighters have recently deployed to help combat Canada’s western wildfires. Such cooperation contributes not only to Australia’s partners’ disaster resilience, but also secures needed capacity in Australia during times of need. While international dynamics were not factored explicitly into the select committee’s report, they are critical to planning and preparing for future disaster-response capacity. 

Of course, the ADF can reduce its involvement in domestic disasters only if our civilian capacity for disaster management is strengthened significantly. As Raymond Whitehead noted in his testimony to the committee, a civilian force will need to be able to 

… provide heavy logistic and tactical support to local frontline services, including such things as: communications and IT support, medical support through deployable hospitals, heavy logistics support. It would also have access to equipment such as helicopters of different sizes, specialist observation and situational awareness aircraft, a fleet of transport planes, and tactical and strategic water bombers ….

It will also need far greater numbers of emergency-response personnel than are available today. While there’s an excellent body of Australian disaster-response experts—including ADF veterans contributing to Disaster Relief Australia—the ADF is facing a recruitment crisis. Beyond needing to limit requests to the ADF for disaster response, Australia will also have dwindling numbers of ADF-trained disaster-response experts available to train and supplement a future civilian force. This necessitates significantly increasing the scope and breadth of trained disaster responders in the near term. 

The obvious solution is to ask emerging generations, who will bear the brunt of climate-amplified disasters, to fill out those ranks—but how governments do that is crucial. 

Young generations know they face a burden of higher global temperatures and climate impacts: up to 75 percent of Australians aged 16 to 25 years are concerned about climate change, according to a YouGov report last year. That’s understandable: global temperatures may breach the Paris Agreement’s lower ‘safe’ threshold of 1.5°C by the 2030s and reach catastrophic levels of warming by the end of this century without further action by governments. Youths’ commitment to tackle this head on has been clear through their climate activism and protests, demonstrating their desire to effect change rather than be paralysed by climate anxiety. 

The federal government should leverage that concern and energy, but its efforts will be rightly met with cynicism if they’re not matched by far more ambitious emissions-reduction and climate-adaptation action. What basis should youth have for a sense of voluntary disaster-response duty when past governments and generations have failed to take on the costs of emissions reductions? Failing that voluntary sense of duty, given the strength of protests against insufficient climate action, how will they react to being drafted into a pathway of complicated (and arguably ineffective) mandatory national service? 

The path forward should begin with a genuine process to engage Australia’s young and emerging generations about how they want to build their future. Success will also depend on how much the participants develop a genuine sense of ownership and agency. 

Governments at all levels in Australia should seize this as an opportunity: our climate trajectory is dire, but not hopeless, as long as many required changes are made. Emissions must be reduced rapidly as part of an equitable energy transition that grows future economic opportunity. Climate-adaptation funding and resilience building must be scaled significantly to minimise the extent of future risk. The considerable disaster-response expertise and resilience among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities should also be sought and supported, as the committee notes, including by funding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community response units. 

At the federal level, bold commitment is needed to devise what should become an intergenerational strategy for climate-amplified disaster response. Heavily informed by younger generations, this would be complementary to Australia’s forthcoming National Adaptation Plan, while laying out a roadmap to train, equip and organise young and future generations to meet rising disaster risks at the local and national levels. 

To be clear: enhancing Australia’s disaster-response capacity alone will be insufficient. While the ADF’s involvement in disaster response must be limited, the much greater task here is getting buy-in from emerging generations for future disaster-response capacity. If that can be done right, future generations can be given a meaningful way to build a safer and more resilient future for themselves, while freeing the ADF to focus on its core missions. 

This article was published by The Strategist.