Australian Disaster Resilience Conference 2025

Speaker profiles

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Explore the people and presentations coming to the 2025 Australian Disaster Resilience Conference.

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View presentation slides and conference papers

Ingrid Ngoorlak Cumming

Honorary Fellow
Murdoch University

Keynote speaker – shared with AFAC25

Ingrid is a is a proud Whadjuk Balardong Noongar woman from Fremantle, Western Australia. Ingrid was given the name “Ngoorlak” by her Elders which is the name for the Carnarby Cockatoo, the bringer of rains, healing and change.

Ingrid Cumming is a 100% owned and operated First Nations business certified by Supply Nation and member of the Whadjuk Corporation and Noongar Chamber of Commerce. With over 15 years of experience working across Government, Aboriginal Controlled organisations, Corporate and the not-for-profit sectors, Ingrid is a recognised young leader within the First Nations community and across many sectors for her work in community engagement, strategic development and leadership, policy and program development, training and education.

Ingrid also is an entertaining and engaging facilitator, performer and speaker, as she has travelled the world presenting her research, publications and appearing as a guest on national and local tv programs such as ABC's The Drum and even stand-up comedy.

Ingrid is a proud Murdoch University and Melbourne Business School Alumnus and has been honoured to serve on many boards including SEDA WA, Aboriginal Women in Business and even served as a Commissioner for Conservation for the WA state government and recipient and finalist of multiple awards in her career.

Ingrid's work is driven by her passion for change and reconciliation, and to make a positive and authentic impact to ensure the journey of truth telling, reconciliation and empowering First Nations people and allies keeps going.

Mami Mizutori

Former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction
Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)

Keynote speaker – shared with AFAC25

Mami Mizutori was the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction from March 2018 until December 2023. From 2011, she was the Executive Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

Before moving to the UK, she had joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in 1983, where she served as Director of the United Nations Policy Division, the National Security Policy Division and the Status of US Forces Agreement Division, and Director of the Japan Information and Culture Centre at the Japanese Embassy in London.

She is currently an Advisor to Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co., Ltd, a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge University, UK, as well as on the Board of Association of Aid and Relief, Japan.

Mark Hardingham QFSM

National Fire Chiefs Council Chair

National Fire Chiefs Council

Keynote speakers – shared with AFAC25

Mark has recently retired after a 35-year career in the fire and rescue service. In his last role, he was the Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) in the UK. The Council is the professional voice of the UK fire and rescue service and the membership body for all 50 UK fire and rescue services, Chief Fire Officers and senior leaders. Mark was elected into the role of the NFCC Chair in 2021 and served until the end of his term in 2025.

In the role Mark provided advice to government, the Home Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for the fire and rescue service. He worked closely with the government’s inspectorate of the fire and rescue service, national employers and other national and international fire service bodies – AFAC, Metro Fire Chiefs and the FEU to name a few. Mark co-hosted the inaugural World Fire Congress hosted by the US in Washington in 2024, and the UK will be hosting in 2026 in London.

Prior to being the NFCC Chair Mark was also the NFCC lead for Building Safety, a role he took on a few months before the Grenfell Tower fire. He has been extensively involved in advising and supporting government, fire services and other fire partners on all issues associated with the Grenfell Tower fire and subsequent national inquiry.

Mark began his fire service career 35 years ago in Essex and served across many fire stations and in many roles. He was appointed as the Deputy Chief Fire Officer in Suffolk in 2010 and then Chief Fire Officer from 2013 to 2020.

Away from work, and now in semi-retirement, Mark enjoys golf, cycling, running and generally keeping fit. He is married to Vickie with 2 grown up boys Jack and Joey…and a dog called Doris.

Panel: TBC

Speakers TBC

Keynote panel – shared with AFAC25

Bio TBC

Leigh Sales AM

Author and Journalist
Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Keynote speaker– shared with AFAC25

Leigh Sales AM is a multi-award-winning author and journalist at the ABC and anchors the much-loved Australian Story program. Before that, she presented the network's prime time current affairs program 7.30 for 12 years. She has been the face of the ABC's major events coverage, including federal election and budget nights.

Leigh has interviewed every living Australian Prime Minister and innumerable world leaders and celebrities from Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to Paul McCartney and Elton John. She's the author of 5 books, including the national bestseller Any Ordinary Day, Well Hello co-written with Annabel Crabb, and her latest Storytellers - a fascinating insight into the vital and much-misunderstood profession of Journalism. Leigh's wildly popular podcast Chat 10 Looks 3 has hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Bernadette Plane APM
Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA

Samantha Stokes
Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA

Inaugural recovery programs for Aboriginal communities – Kimberley floods

Presentation outline TBC

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Speaker bios

Bernadette Plane APM (Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA)

Many years spent engaging with people under stress as a police officer have proved a strong foundation for Bernadette to lead the recovery efforts after the Kimberley floods.

Bernadette is responsible for coordinating the state recovery operations from flooding caused by Tropical Cyclone Ellie in January 2023. She leads a range of projects vital to recovery and resilience for flood-affected communities, working in partnership with local government, state agencies and traditional owners to foster a collaborative, locally led recovery which supports longer term social and economic outcomes.
As a career police officer for more than 30 years, Bernadette gained practical experience with higher risk people suffering extreme stress. She served in both metropolitan and regional areas and held a senior leadership role in the Western Australia Police Force before joining DFES.

Bernadette was awarded an Australia Police Medal in acknowledgment of her work and commitment to trauma-informed interviewing practices in the response to crimes against children and vulnerable people.

Samantha Stokes (Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA)

Operational recovery experience from the Yarloop and Wooroloo bushfires is integral to Samantha’s role managing the response to Western Australia’s largest-ever flood event.

She builds on her DFES work following the bushfire disasters of 2016 and 2021 in the task of overseeing a complex suite of multi-agency programs to support community recovery and reconstruction in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Ellie in January 2023.

With a strong focus on building resilience across all recovery domains, Sam’s contribution has been integral to the governance, implementation and ongoing evaluation of the bespoke programs designed to meet community needs.

In a career spanning more than 20 years, Sam has demonstrated government expertise in land use planning and emergency management, including bushfire risk management, infrastructure planning policy, strategic government projects and environmental initiatives.

Driven by the importance of effective stakeholder engagement and outcomes-focused approaches, Sam has made a seamless transition from land use planning to disaster recovery and is committed to striving towards the delivery of best-practice resilience and recovery in WA.

Presentation outline

Presentation outline TBC

Lisa Keedle
Yarra Ranges Council

Garry Detez
Yarra Ranges Council

Nelson Aldridge
Yarra Ranges Council

Enhancing cultural knowledge and awareness in disaster recovery: a pathway to resilience

Recent disasters in Victoria and NSW have highlighted gaps in relief, recovery, and healing processes in engaging with Indigenous communities. Aboriginal communities have struggled to access effective and culturally appropriate relief and recovery services, adding to existing trauma.

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Speaker bios

Lisa Keedle (Yarra Ranges Council)

Lisa brings over 15 years of experience working alongside communities to strengthen disaster resilience through co-designed and community-informed approaches. Her career spans diverse roles across the agriculture sector, emergency services, the Australian Red Cross, and local government—each reinforcing her deep commitment to inclusive, locally driven emergency management.

Currently leading one of Victoria’s largest local government emergency management and recovery teams at Yarra Ranges Council, Lisa oversees efforts to build long-term community disaster resilience through a comprehensive disaster risk reduction lens. In a municipality facing complex and high-risk hazards, her team collaborates closely with residents, community groups, and local Aboriginal organisations to embed traditional knowledge and culturally safe practices into local disaster planning and response.

Grounded in the lessons of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires and 2021 June storm, Lisa’s work has evolved into a model of adaptive, community-centered resilience. She is passionate about sharing insights from this journey and advocating how the role of local government can foster inclusive, sustainable, and culturally informed disaster risk reduction.

Garry Detez (Yarra Ranges Council)

Garry has a post graduate Diploma in Community Cultural Development from Melbourne University. He has a comprehensive knowledge of, and approximately 30 years’ experience, living and working with Victorian Aboriginal communities. He is a proud father and grandfather of a bunch of Monero Yuin boys from Southern NSW and far eastern Victoria. Garry has developed and implemented a range of capacity building projects, community cultural development initiatives, strategic planning and policy outcomes for the Aboriginal community.

Garry is currently the Indigenous Development Coordinator at Yarra Ranges Council where he heads up a small but dynamic team of Aboriginal cultural practitioners involved in cultural burning, cultural recovery and cultural safety.

Nelson Aldridge (Yarra Ranges Council)

Nelson is a proud Taungurung man who has calls the Yarra Vally home. Nelson has a strong sporting background where he heads up the Warburton Football Club in the role of Captain. Nelson is the Aboriginal Cultural Recovery Coordinator at Yarra Ranges Council and is responsible for the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems into emergency and land management locally and regionally and has an eye to state and national wide influences.

Nelson has the key role in developing and delivering a range of cultural literacy initiatives and programs and has driven a number of workshops and symposiums highlighting Aboriginal voices in self-determinative responses to community challenges.

Presentation outline

Indigenous knowledge systems achieved a natural equilibrium unmatched as a model of environmental sustainability and resilience as Aboriginal people meticulously cared for Country and community over thousands of generations.

Since the 2009 Black Saturday fires, Yarra Ranges Council has sought to draw on Indigenous knowledge systems in building resilience in landscapes and communities. This approach is supported by the Royal Commission findings into National Natural Disaster Arrangements Report 18.6 'All governments should work with Traditional Owners to explore the relationship between Indigenous land management and natural disaster resilience'.

Yarra Ranges Council has undertaken a deep cultural learning journey to build the cultural capability of emergency management and regional recovery partners. Through local forums on trauma-informed cultural practices, Indigenous knowledge systems, and cultural safety approaches, Yarra Ranges invested in the value of Indigenous knowledge systems to improve local relief and recovery capability, leading to the Our Country, Our Way National Symposium in 2024. The Symposium presented recent Indigenous lived experiences, pathways forward in disaster resilience and healing through Indigenous knowledge systems.

The symposium evaluation clearly summarised the benefits:

building deep cultural awareness with the statewide emergency recovery attendees
listening to Indigenous voices to address the gaps in relief, recovery, and healing processes
Indigenous knowledge systems capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster by building resilience in landscapes and communities.

This presentation will showcase how to progress to enhanced Cultural awareness and capability in Disaster Relief and Recovery - a local approach to a national issue.

Wennie van Riet
GenWest

Shweta Kawatra Dakin
GenWest

Our Community, Our Voice: a gendered and culturally diverse lens on an urban disaster

The 2022 Maribyrnong River flood in Melbourne exposed critical gaps in disaster recovery, particularly for migrant women. GenWest's community-centred and feminist-led response to urban disasters aligns with the conference theme, 'Embracing radical transformation: The future is now,' by shifting the paradigm of disaster recovery to centre lived experience and drive systemic change.

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Speaker bios

Wennie van Riet (GenWest)

Wennie is originally from the Netherlands where she studied gender and sexuality studies and successfully completed her Research Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. For the past decade she has worked in the non-for-profit sector working in community development and working for social justice.

At GenWest, a women’s health service in Melbourne, she focuses on addressing the impacts of climate change on communities facing discrimination and gendered oppression. For the past 18 months she has been leading the Climate Resilience work. She delivered the Our Community, Our Voice program, which is centered around working with identified migrant and refugee communities in disaster preparedness and recovery in an urban setting. She championed the peer-to-peer based bi-cultural education model which proved very successful in establishing trust, addressing access barriers, and delivering numerous recovery initiatives while being flexible in pivoting to community needs.

In addition, she is a board member of Span Community House since 2017, and chairperson of the board since 2021, driving climate adaptation at a local community level. In December 2024 she became an accredited facilitator for Gender and Disaster Australia’s ‘Lessons in Disaster’ training.

Shweta Kawatra Dakin (GenWest)

Shweta is a first-generation Indian migrant and a passionate advocate for human rights and gender equity, with over a decade of experience leading community-driven initiatives across Australia, India, and Indonesia.

Drawing from her lived experience of gender-based violence, her work is deeply rooted in her personal journey and dedication to social change. At GenWest, a women’s health service in Melbourne, she focuses on preventing gender-based violence, promoting health education, and addressing the impacts of climate change on communities facing discrimination and gendered oppression.

Shweta is known for mobilising migrant and refugee communities, designing culturally safe programs, and applying intersectional, gender-responsive approaches to health and disaster resilience. Since 2022, she has led Our Community, Our Voice, a flood resilience and recovery program that supports refugee and migrant women and their families affected by climate change and disasters. The initiative is recognised for integrating a gendered and intersectional lens in community recovery efforts.

In 2024, Shweta was named Finalist - Community and Advocacy, Australia’s Stellar South Asian Women Awards for her contributions to community-building, social justice, and advocacy. She is a founding member of 2 refugee-led organisations in Jakarta, Indonesia and continues to advocate for inclusive, community-led solutions in policy and practice.

Presentation outline

This abstract highlights our innovative, community-led approach to building disaster resilience in Metropolitan Melbourne through a gendered and culturally intersectional lens.

Following the 2022 flood, GenWest pioneered a Victorian-first, peer-led bicultural model that integrates health and human rights-based information to address the financial, housing, and mental health recovery needs of migrant communities. Informed by demographic analysis, the model ensures that migrant communities remain at the centre of the project's recovery and healing efforts.

Our Lessons of the Maribyrnong River Flood 2022 report, shaped by the lived experiences of flood-affected women from migrant and refugee backgrounds, highlighted the urgent need for localised, gendered, and intersectional disaster management.

These findings guided Our Community, Our Voice flood resilience and recovery program. This initiative empowers migrant and refugee women by identifying community needs and access barriers and building capacity of both community and professionals in the field. We have integrated lived experience to drive systemic change through both advocacy and building workforce capacity of front-line emergency management and recovery staff to support migrant and refugee communities.

GenWest continues to advocate for equitable and inclusive disaster management through a feminist and intersectional lens—building long-term resilience and transforming disaster response for a more just and equitable future, starting now.

Dr Zoë D'Arcy
Monash University

Dr Adriana Keating
Monash University

Assessing systemic community disaster resilience: taking a measured approach to radical transformation

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Speaker bios

Dr Zoë D'Arcy (Monash University)

Dr Zoë D’Arcy is a Research Fellow with the Fire to Flourish Program at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute. Her current research work with the Fire to Flourish program takes an action research approach to assess and strengthen community disaster resilience.

Zoë’s doctoral research at RMIT University examined the concept of fire-adaptive communities. She used a systemic design approach to explore how adaptive approaches might be applied - and are already being applied by Australian communities - in an Australian context to strengthen the resilience of both people and ecosystems to bushfires.

Before joining Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Zoë had a 20-year career with the National Archives of Australia, leading programs to take the Archives’ vast collection of historic government documents out to the Australian public. She has a strong interest in Australian history and policy.

Dr Adriana Keating (Monash University)

Dr Adriana Keating is a Research Fellow within the Fire to Flourish Program at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute. An expert in community disaster resilience, she is passionate about transforming systems to better support communities to lead action, reduce risk and enhance wellbeing.

Adriana is a systems thinker whose research has, for over 15 years, focused on the human dimensions of disasters at the science-policy-practice interface. Her work utilises systems analysis, resilience measurement, disaster forensics and participatory community processes to conceptualise and effect change in disaster resilience both in Australia and internationally.

Adriana holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science from Monash University, a Master of International and Development Economics from the Australian National University, and a Doctorate in Socioeconomics from the Vienna University of Business and Economics.

Presentation outline

With climate-related disasters becoming more devastating and expensive, there are calls for radical transformation to systemically strengthen community disaster resilience. But what does that really mean? In our complex societies, what should be changed, who should be involved, and how might it actually be achieved? This presentation will showcase an innovative approach to tangibly, comprehensively and holistically assessing community disaster resilience to explore these questions and help provide some practical answers.

We will share new research from Fire to Flourish (Monash University) that has empirically assessed systemic disaster resilience of eight Australian communities. The approach used is the first time that community bushfire and flood resilience in Australia has been measured using a holistic, community-tailored, systems-based tool that looks across all domains - the natural environment, the built environment, health and wellbeing, social and community capital, and the economic environment. Importantly, it also directly involves community members in data collection and analysis.

Our project demonstrates that disaster resilience can be meaningfully measured at a community scale to directly inform priorities for actions to strengthen community disaster resilience.

Strong patterns emerged across the 8 communities that shed light on systems change needs such as long-term planning, social inclusivity, and investment in critical infrastructure. They provide valuable guidance that can be used by the communities themselves, resilience organisations, community organisations, local government and policymakers to strengthen disaster resilience, preparedness and response. Our recommendations call for radical transformation in how these players collaborate, prioritise and invest.

However, when radical transformation is called for, it is wise not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Our results also identify real strengths in our current disaster resilience systems. Our presentation will outline these, and show that truly understanding these, and collaboratively building on them, provides practical steps to strengthen community disaster resilience.

Prof John Fien

RMIT

Implications for strengthening urban resilience from understanding cities as complex adaptive systems

This paper adopts an understanding of cities as complex 'systems of systems of systems' and explores the implications of the resulting paradigmatic shift in the theory and practice of urban resilience over the past decade. This shift has involved several conceptual and practical shifts in disaster risk management.

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Speaker bio

Prof John Fien (RMIT)

John is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University, and teaches in the Master of Disaster, Design and Development degree. John’s special interests in disaster resilience focus on cities as complex adaptive systems and how systemic design can be used as a participatory process for social learning and transformative resilience.

John has worked at Griffith and Swinburne Universities as well as RMIT and has led research, training and evaluation projects for both national organizations (e.g. NHRA, AHURI, Melbourne Water) and international agencies (e.g. UNEP, UNESCO, World Bank, OECD, and WWF International).

Presentation outline

For example, this 'systems framing' sees towns and cities as complex adaptive systems characterised by open boundaries, non-linear dynamics and, as complexity theory describes it, 'in a constant state of becoming'. The selforganization and adaptive cycles of regeneration and decline that drive change within
complex systems do not produce direct, one-for-one, input-output results. Consequently, the impacts of hazards–as well as the outcomes of resilience-building interventions–are best understood as probabilities not predictions.

The paper posits several implications for strengthening urban resilience from understanding urban hazards and resilience from such a systems perspective. These include developing policy and action protocols that recognise: the systemic nature of disaster risk, the value of a multi-risk approach to strengthening urban resilience over single or multi-hazard approaches, and ways of responding to systemic risk. In particular, recognising urban vulnerabilities and risks are systemic means also recognising just as severe shocks can lead to trigger points that catalyse and intensify cascading damage and loss, then action at key leverage points can reduce the stressors that cause systemic vulnerability. Thus, strengthening urban resilience need to be focused on these leverage points and embedding upstream in the systems’ dynamics to help future-proof the resilience of social, economic, infrastructure and environmental systems of towns and cities.

These implications explain the dynamic nature of the systemic interactions that magnify disaster risk in complex urban systems. They also provide a framework upon which disaster risk management can be planned and undertaken to reduce systemic vulnerabilities in cities and increase urban resilience.

Dr Aaron Nicholas
Deakin University

Bridget Tehan
Red Cross

The power of connection: quantifying social capital’s role in disaster resilience and recovery

Disasters cost the Australian economy $38 billion annually, with this figure projected to rise without effective resilience strategies. In a groundbreaking study, 'The hidden power of community: Unveiling social capital’s role in Australia’s disaster resilience', Australian Red Cross and Deakin University have quantified the economic and social value of social capital—defined as connections, trust, and reciprocity within communities—in mitigating the adverse effects of disasters.

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speaker bios

Aaron Nicholas (Deakin University)

Aaron is a behavioural and experimental economist at Deakin University. He is broadly interested in how to measure and define unobservables, including notions of wellbeing, poverty and responsibility. He also works on how the 'rules of the market' (e.g. competition, prices, profit-seeking) and the 'rules of the family' (e.g. altruism, reciprocal exchange, fairness) interact.

Bridget Tehan (Red Cross)

Bridget Tehan is Senior Advisor, Humanitarian Diplomacy at Australian Red Cross, working to provide advocacy, sector coordination, and thought leadership with a focus on disaster resilience, preparedness, and recovery. Bridget is also co-founder and President of the Australasian Women in Emergencies Network which works to promote, support and recognise the contributions of women to emergencies and disaster resilience.

Bridget has more than 15 years’ experience in emergency management and disaster resilience. She has significant expertise in community resilience, including in strengths, needs, and priorities of people who may be vulnerable or disadvantaged before, during, and after emergencies as well as their needs in the mitigation, transition and adaptation to climate change.

Bridget also has expertise in the role of community, social service and not-for-profit organisations in emergency management and disaster resilience at local, grass roots and strategic levels. Bridget has experience in cross-sector collaboration and cooperation and has led a range of award-winning programs and projects.

Presentation outline

Key findings reveal that communities with higher levels of social capital recover faster and endure significantly less long-term impact from disasters. Vulnerable populations, including people who are older, unemployed, or divorced, and people living in remote areas, are most affected by disasters, particularly in regions with low social capital. Remarkably, the monetary value of social capital in mitigating negative mental health and life satisfaction impacts ranges from $396 per person annually for older individuals to $3,808 for those in remote areas. For a remote community of 6,770 people, this translates to an economic
benefit of approximately $25 million per year.

The findings highlight the pressing need for targeted investments in social capital, especially in remote and disadvantaged communities. Enhancing trust, fostering community engagement, and building collaborative networks are critical strategies for improving life satisfaction, mental health, and economic stability following disasters.

This research underscores the necessity of integrating social capital initiatives into disaster resilience planning to ensure faster recovery and stronger, more connected communities. We invite you to explore how these findings can be applied to strengthen resilience within your community and welcome discussions on collaborative opportunities to enhance social capital and disaster preparedness for your constituents.

Join us in shaping a future where communities thrive in the face of adversity through the power of social capital.

Associate Prof Michelle Villeneuve

University of Sydney

Empowering resilience: advancing inclusive emergency planning with Disability Inclusive Emergency Planning (DIEP) forums

People with disability face significant disaster risks due to restricted access to essential supports and exclusion from community-level emergency planning. Research shows these constraints impact their emergency response, exacerbating vulnerability and delaying recovery. Australia has committed to adopting inclusive emergency management approaches involving people with disability and their networks.

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Speaker bio

Associate Prof Michelle Villeneuve (University of Sydney)

TBC

Presentation outline

In partnership with local governments, we implemented Disability Inclusive Emergency Planning (DIEP) forums using the Structured Interview Matrix (SIM) methodology. This approach facilitated inclusive engagement and promoted shared learning among diverse stakeholders, including people with disability, community services organisations, emergency services, and government representatives. The structured three-phase SIM process - from individual interviews to group discussions and a comprehensive plenary session - ensured thorough assimilation and synthesis of diverse perspectives, proving effective for shared learning about inclusive emergency planning.

DIEP was implemented across 28 multi-stakeholder forums in 5 Australian jurisdictions engaging 832 participants including 235 people with lived experience of disability. Forums uncovered key themes about the unmet needs of people with disability in emergencies and identified key contributions of different stakeholders to ensuring safety and well-being outcomes that leave nobody behind. These insights emphasise the need for integrated emergency management planning at individual, organisational, and community levels.

DIEP forums have proven successful in activating community-led preparedness actions of multiple stakeholders that focus on pre-planning for the extra support needs of people with disability in emergencies. The effectiveness of these forums has shaped leadership practices within local governments for inclusive emergency management, prompting the widespread adoption of this model throughout Australia. Shared learning at DIEP forums validates the SIM methodology's effectiveness in promoting truly inclusive emergency planning.

This presentation will simulate key aspects of a DIEP forum, offering firsthand experience of its structured engagement and collaborative problem-solving, and will also introduce the inclusive emergency planning conversation guide developed through this approach.

Melissa Pexton
Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA

Dr Rachel Armstrong
Western Australia Local Government Association

Dr Jill Charker
National Emergency Management Agency

Natalie Egleton
Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal

Moderator: Sally Kuschel
National Emergency Management Agency

SPONSOR PANEL | From global frameworks to national strategy: a discussion about the role of government policy in reducing disaster risk and building resilience in Australia

Panel outline TBC

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Speaker bios

Melissa Pexton (Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA)

Melissa Pexton is an exceptional leader of recovery and emergency management practice, with over 20 years’ of extensive experience in the emergency management sector at national, state and local levels.

Deputy Commissioner Pexton represents both DFES and the State on several national committees relating to recovery and emergency management. She was appointed Deputy Commissioner of the Strategy and Emergency Management Command within DFES in May 2022 and is responsible for not only resilience and recovery, but strategic, legal and enterprise risk matters within the department. The DFES Training Academy is also the responsibility of Deputy Commissioner Pexton.

In April 2021, she was appointed by the Premier as the State Recovery Controller for Severe Tropical Cyclone Seroja, providing leadership to a whole government recovery operation. Deputy Commissioner Pexton has been instrumental in building the recovery capability in WA based on the whole of community and whole of government approach. She is currently the Executive Officer for the State Emergency Management Committee; a position held since February 2024.

Dr Rachel Armstrong (Western Australia Local Government Association)

Dr Armstrong is responsible for providing comprehensive policy support across all aspects of emergency management and its intersection with local governments. Dr Armstrong represents the local government sector on various Western Australian State-level bushfire and emergency management committees, including in the areas of disaster resilience, recovery, risk, volunteer sustainability, and bushfire operations.

Before joining Western Australia Local Government Association, Rachel spent 10 years working in Community Preparedness and Recovery at the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services. With an academic background in sustainability policy and regional development, Rachel has a robust understanding of the complex emergency management challenges faced by local governments with increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and WA communities increasingly being exposed to emergencies they have not historically experienced.

Dr Jill Charker (National Emergency Management Agency)

Dr Jill Charker is Deputy Coordinator-General, Disaster Resilience and Recovery at the National Emergency Management Agency, based in Canberra. In this role, Jill has responsibility for the administration of over $30 billion in Australian Government disaster recovery and resilience funding programs, and policy around disaster recovery and risk reduction.

Prior to her current role, Jill was a junior partner at McKinsey & Company specialising in public sector strategy and organisational issues. Jill has also held CEO and Deputy Secretary roles in the Australian Public Service over many years, across diverse portfolios including employment, human services, immigration, superannuation and national statistics. Jill holds a PhD in psychology and statistics, and has completed an Executive Master of Public Administration through the Australia and NZ School of Government.

Natalie Egleton (Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal)

Natalie Egleton is the Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR). With a 25-year career in the non-profit and philanthropic sector in consulting, fundraising and partnerships, and organisation development roles, she is passionate about facilitating effective and enduring responses to issues facing rural communities.

Since becoming CEO of FRRR in 2015 she has led the organisation through a period of significant growth and impact, facilitating over $80m in funding to remote, rural, and regional communities through hundreds of partnerships and collaborations, many of which support regional communities to recover from and prepare for disasters and other climate related impacts.

Moderator: Sally Kuschel (National Emergency Management Agency)

Sally joined the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) in January 2024 as Assistant Coordinator, Strategy and Resilience Policy.

Sally has been involved with disaster and climate resilience policy since 2016 at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, former Emergency Management Australia, and the first National Resilience Taskforce. Sally led the team that developed the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework. Sally has worked in the Australian Public Service for 2 decades on a range of law and justice policy issues, and before that as a commercial lawyer. Most recently, Sally was part of taskforce that developed the Australian Government’s Response to the Robodebt Royal Commission.

Sally values working collaboratively to get the best outcomes and appreciates the opportunity NEMA has to work with diverse stakeholders to help reduce harm and suffering for Australian communities.

Panel outline

Panel outline TBC

Mark Trüdinger

Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management

Community consultation to inform disaster recovery planning and contribute to community healing

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Speaker bio

Mark Trüdinger (Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management)

Mark Trüdinger is the Group Recovery Manager for Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management. As part of Northland’s Cyclone Gabrielle Recovery, he has worked with more than 200 organisations over the last 2 years. Mark was a co-founder of the Recovery Specialists’ Network of Aotearoa and is convenor of the Community Wellbeing Recovery Network. Most recently, Mark has become a peer reviewer for Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal and book reviewer for the Journal of Disaster Studies.

Presentation outline

Cyclone Gabrielle was the largest emergency event New Zealand had seen in a generation. While the event itself lasted about a week, the effects will take years to recover from. In preparing its Regional Recovery Plan Northland Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) asked ‘How can we keep the people who at the heart of the work at the heart of the work?’. This led to a Recovery Plan that involved more than 600 people and includes direct contributions drawn from more than 300 community members … produced within 2 months of the event.

In something of a radical departure, community voices led nearly every section of the plan, and the visions (plural) for this Recovery were written by community members themselves. In fact, communities were invited to articulate the very definition of Recovery itself.

Overall, the resulting Regional Response Plan represented diverse voices, showed how emergency management and government agencies can be responsive to community suggestions, and made links between the emergency response all the way through to longer-term thinking about social disadvantage and climate change. We’ve already had feedback that this plan may change how the wider sector thinks about community engagement and preparing recovery plans in the future.

This presentation will explore how to do ‘rapid community consultation’ for recovery planning, how this kind of community consultation can in itself be a key part of community healing (drawing on an approach used around the world in post-disaster community work, called collective narrative practice), and how recovery plans can be prepared that reflect diverse communities.

This presentation will step attendees through how we can ask questions that are simple, but not simplistic; and how to weave community voices into powerful collective documents of resilience and hope.

Danielle O'Hara

University of Queensland

Interagency conflict in disaster recovery: understanding what drives it so we can navigate it better

This presentation shares findings from a PhD research project on conflict in disaster recovery collaborations. It focuses on how practitioners can transform their approach to navigating interagency conflict to achieve better community recovery outcomes.

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Speaker bio

Danielle O'Hara (University of Queensland)

Danielle is a disaster management practitioner currently undertaking a PhD on the causes of conflict in disaster recovery collaborations with the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland. Her research (and practice) interests include interagency collaboration, disaster politics, community engagement, and conflict management pre- and post-disaster.

Danielle has worked in disaster management for over a decade and has been employed by government, the not-for-profit sector and as a consultant.

Presentation outline

Collaboration is often promoted as a 'magic bullet' (Dewulf & Elbers, 2018, p.2) for managing the complexities of disaster recovery, but it is rarely straightforward. Recovery requires agencies and individuals with differing interests, knowledge, practices, and values to work together. While such dynamics exist in other settings, disaster recovery exacerbates these challenges due to factors like organisational stress, time pressure, uncertainty, and unfamiliarity. These pressures make collaboration and communication more difficult.

Despite this, we don't have frameworks for effectively managing conflict. Existing research and practice tools tend to focus on collaboration, but not the conflict that takes place within it. More generally, conflict is often avoided, seen as uncomfortable or a distraction from recovery efforts. However, with disasters becoming more intense and costly and collaboration needed more than ever, we need to confront conflict directly and explore new ways to understand and navigate it.

This PhD research involved semi-structured interviews with 38 Australian disaster recovery practitioners about their experiences of conflict in recovery. The presentation will detail 4 primary factors driving conflict: value differences, the structure of the recovery system, organisational interests, and relational dynamics.

The presentation will conclude with four actionable insights for agencies in disaster recovery, focusing on positive action and change: acknowledge conflict is part of collaboration, recognise shared values unite us, ditch the stereotypes and invest in relationship building. Sector-specific findings for government and NGOs will also be shared.

Nikhila Madabhushi
Monash University

Professor Mel Dodd
Monash University

Catherine Gearing
Social Recovery Reference Group

Insights into temporary accommodation - developing a trauma-informed methodology to capture lived experiences of post-disaster housing recovery

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Speaker bios

Nikhila Madabhushi (Monash University)

Nikhila is an architect, researcher and educator. Her research-based practice foregrounds decolonising and participatory design methods for built and spatial environments. Her work has received various awards and recognitions, enabling her to gain diverse knowledge(s) on the confluence of Country, disasters and place. She publishes, speaks and exhibits regularly on these themes, with her work aiming to build bridges between academic, disciplinary and public discourse.

She is currently a Research Fellow at Monash Art Design and Architecture where she continues co-creating applied research with diverse communities across Australia, concurrent to practice.

Professor Mel Dodd (Monash University)

Mel is an award-winning architect, educator and academic leader whose underpinning values and mission places creativity at the heart of positive social change, achieving this through transformative education and creative inquiry. Currently Interim Dean at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, and the Co-Director of Monash Urban Lab, her practice-based research explores innovative socially engaged design and participatory processes through strategic partnerships with government, industry and civil society.

Educated at the University of Cambridge and with a PhD by Practice from RMIT University, she is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK, and an Adjunct Professor at Central Saint Martins. Her publications include Spatial Practices: Modes of Action and Engagement with the City (Routledge 2019) and Live Projects: Designing with People (RMIT Press, 2012).

Mel has been a collaborator with muf architecture/art and was a contributory author to the practice publication This is What We Do: A Muf Manual (Ellipsis, 2002). She was Curator of Ground Melbourne at Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2023).

Catherine Gearing (Social Recovery Reference Group)

Catherine has been the National Consultant with the Social Recovery Reference Group since 2021. She has worked with the NSW Government since 2017, where she contributed to the Disaster Welfare, Recovery and Resilience teams. In these positions, Catherine has supported recovery operations following events such as the 2017 Lismore floods, the 2018 Tathra fires, the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and the 2021 Northern Rivers floods.

Prior to her work with the NSW Government, she worked with the International Federation of Red Cross in East Africa, supporting emergency responses to Ethiopia's drought, flooding in Burundi, and a refugee crisis in Uganda. Catherine also spent 5 years in the Philippines as the Country Coordinator for the Australian Red Cross, where she led recovery efforts following Typhoon Haiyan.

Her career in emergency management began with the Australian Red Cross, where she was part of the Australian Emergency Services team. In this capacity, Catherine played a key role in supporting the development of the national preparedness program, Emergency REDiPlan, and played an integral role in multiple emergency responses across Australia, including interjurisdictional support in the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires.

Presentation outline

Safe and stable housing is an essential requirement for functional, healthy individuals and communities. Following a disaster, damaged and destroyed housing can become an all-consuming stress factor for affected individuals and their wider community. This impacts stability, employment, sense of place and overall well-being. This is especially true when considering inequity of access to stable housing due to a range of circumstances. With the increasing frequency of major disasters coupled with a national housing crisis across Australia, post-disaster housing—from immediate shelter through to long-term stable solutions—is facing more pressure than ever.

Catherine Gearing (National Consultant, Disaster Recovery, Social Recovery Reference Group (SRRG)) along with Professor Mel Dodd (Monash University) and Nikhila Madabhushi (Monash University) will together share their co-developed methodology and early findings from the research project Insights into Temporary and Emergency Accommodation.

Funded by Natural Hazards Research Australia and formed as a collaboration between SRRG, Monash Art Design and Architecture and National Indigenous Disaster Resilience, the project aims to identify best practices in emergency and temporary housing. The 3 year project will inform policy and guide the development of resources for government and not-for-profits to support displaced people to transition from temporary accommodation to stable housing. The research will be adopted by multiple levels of government and provide critical guidance to agencies charged with managing housing recovery.

Importantly, this project will use ‘trauma-informed’ methods to develop case studies that recount the lived experiences of individuals, communities and recovery practitioners in different states and territories of Australia.

In this presentation the collaborators will discuss how the research design aims to support participants to ‘speak their world’. Furthermore, they will discuss how creative outputs such as film, photography and public exhibitions can be employed in sensitive ways to create easily digestible narratives that offer powerful knowledge translation tools.

Dr Margaret Moreton
GADAus

Loriana Bethune
GADAus

Clare Gibellini
Inclusive Rainbow Voices

Erin Liston-Abel
AFAC

Dejan Greenhalgh-Tomasovic
TBC

PANEL | I spy with my DEI something beginning with … Bringing feminism and intersectionality to the discussion

The 2024 Australian Disaster Resilience Conference's panel on masculinities, culture, and disaster ignited a vital conversation about the role of masculinity in shaping our perceptions and responses to disasters. This year, we are excited to gather a vibrant and diverse lineup of voices that will help us dig deeper into this multifaceted topic.

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Speaker bios

Dr Margaret Moreton (GADAus)

TBC

Loriana Bethune (GADAus)

TBC

Clare Gibellini (Inclusive Rainbow Voices)

TBC

Erin Liston-Abel (AFAC)

TBC

Dejan Greenhalgh-Tomasovic (TBC)

TBC

Presentation outline

Joining our moderator Margaret Moreton will be a panelist from last year alongside new representatives from younger generations and the queer community and the emergency services sector including Clare Gibellini, Erin Linston-Abel and Dejan Greenhalgh-Tomasovic.

The panel will assess the current climate and pressures surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion; and build and build upon last year’s insights exploring masculinity, feminism, gender diversity and intersectionality.

Key questions:

How can we engage in a meaningful conversation about masculinity, feminism and gender in disaster management without resorting to predictable and outdated metaphors?
How can we embrace and engage with diverse expressions of gender in a sector historically bound by rigid cultural norms and segregation?
What changes can we all make to enhance disaster outcomes for diverse genders – in communities and across disaster management?

This year’s panel boldly ventures into the complexities of gender within disaster management. We’ll examine how strategies that embrace a spectrum of gender identities can reform the sector’s culture, fostering more inclusive and empathetic responses. By cultivating an environment where every voice is valued, we aspire to empower the disaster management community to address a wider array of needs, enhancing outcomes in times of crisis before, during, and after disasters. Be part of this essential conversation and help shape a more resilient future!

Anna Brazier
Jesuit Social Services

Jack Piper
ARC Justice

Ebony Hogg
Eastern Community Legal Centre

Disaster justice: enabling collaborative approaches to place-based disaster resilience in the community sector

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Speaker bios

Anna Brazier (Jesuit Social Services)

Anna is the Senior Project Coordinator, Climate Justice at Jesuit Social Services’ Centre for Just Places where she is leading implementation the Climate Partners project. This work uses collaborative action planning to build climate and disaster resilience by strengthening the capacity of local service organisations.

Anna has an extensive background in community strengthening and primary prevention work in the health and wellbeing sectors, with experience in both strategic policy development and program design with government, and on the ground implementation with local community organisations. Working with Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal Community Controlled organisations throughout her career has shaped her commitment to community control and bringing strong stakeholder voices to her work.
Anna has a particular interest in building the capacity of community organisations to develop locally responsive solutions to complex problems and is passionate about using strengths based and systems thinking to build climate and disaster resilience across diverse stakeholders.

Anna holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social and Environmental Policy and Research from RMIT University.

Jack Piper (ARC Justice)

Jack is the Climate Justice Lead at ARC Justice, an advocacy and rights centre that provides free legal and tenancy support, incorporating the Goulburn Valley Community Legal Centre based in Shepparton, the Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre and Housing Justice, a specialist renter support program, both based in Bendigo.

While supporting communities through response and recovery, his role has a focus on preparedness and prevention, including building collaborative relationships with emergency services, local governments, and community and health services in the region, delivering community legal education, and advocating for equity in disaster planning, ensuring everyone’s voices are included in these processes.

Jack has a Bachelor of Engineer (Civil) and a Masters of Environment (Climate Change), has worked within the private sector in plastics recycling, manufacturing and agriculture, within government in water policy, and in the community sector in climate change adaptation.

He is a passionate about supporting decision makers to understand the intersections of climate change and social justice, and the critical role of community service organisations in enabling equitable responses at a local level.

Ebony Hogg (Eastern Community Legal Centre)

Ebony is the Community Engagement Lead for Disaster Recovery and Climate Justice at Eastern Community Legal Centre.

She brings a diverse academic background, holding a Bachelor’s degree in International Development, a Graduate Diploma in Emergency and Disaster Management, and a Master’s in Humanitarian Assistance.

Before joining Eastern Community Legal Centre, Ebony worked internationally with the United Nations, where she became a published author with a focus on climate-induced migration in the Pacific, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation.

Passionate about supporting communities most vulnerable to climate impacts, both geographically and socially, Ebony is currently leading stakeholder engagement in the Yarra Ranges as part of the Climate Partnerships project. Her work involves coordinating collaborative action planning with 40 community service organisations, government agencies, and emergency services.

Presentation outline

In Campaspe Shire, the impacts of the 2022 floods are still being felt. In the Yarra Ranges, the experience of the 2009 fire season, alongside severe storms in 2021, have also had longlasting consequences. These disasters have impacted social networks, social supports, and our environments in complex ways that exacerbate existing inequities. The impacts are far reaching with implications for legal needs, rights and justice. Examples include access to appropriate housing and insurance, and complexities with family violence. These impacts demonstrate the need for the community sector to work together and alongside others to create a resilient future for all.

This presentation responds to the interconnected nature of disasters, while also showcasing the Climate Partnerships project as a collaborative and cross-sectoral responses we know we need to embrace. The Climate Partnerships project is delivered in partnership with Jesuit Social Services’ Centre for Just Places, ARC Justice, Eastern Community Legal Centre, and Federation of Community Legal Centres and is funded by the Australian Government.

Climate Partnerships builds disaster resilience through collaborative planning and collective action. In the Campaspe and Yarra Ranges local government areas, community legal centres are leading this work. Embedded in local communities, community legal centres leverage their knowledge, trust, and relationships to drive place-based initiatives. The project also seeks to leverage learnings about the process, to enhance knowledge and capacity across the community sector to realise disaster justice.

Climate Partnerships recognises the need for creative and innovative approaches that address the interconnectedness of disasters, climate change adaptation and social justice. It creates spaces for diverse organisations with unique perspectives on social justice, the community support system, and emergency management to identify shared goals and priorities for systemic disaster risk reduction in ways that are locally responsive and relevant.

Dr Lisa Ewenson

University of New South Wales

Why is social work under-recognised within the disaster sector? How do we change this?

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Speaker bio

Dr Lisa Ewenson (University of New South Wales)

Dr Lisa Ewenson is a researcher within the HowWeSurvive initiative at the University of NSW, and she has a professional background in both law and social work. Prior to academia, her work centered around the protection and promotion of human rights, including within youth justice and immigration detention settings.

Lisa's current research is concerned with disaster recovery for marginalised groups across Australia, including a focus on the right to adequate housing for older women impacted by climate change-amplified disasters. Lisa is Chief Investigator of the Social Workers and Disaster Management across Australia project. In collaboration with the Yuwaya Ngarra-li team, and as led by the Dharriwaa Elders Group and the Walgett Aboriginal Medical Service, Lisa is Chief Investigator (with 10 other Investigators) of the Walgett Disasters' Response and Recovery Project.

Presentation outline

Social workers make significant contributions across Australia in a range of disaster contexts within strong multidisciplinary teams, yet the explicit social justice, human rights-based, trauma-informed and anti-oppressive expertise and practice that social workers bring to the disaster sector is often under-recognised. Disasters emerge out of the deeply imbalanced power relations and systems enmeshed within our social and environmental fabric, and social workers, already working in long-term roles alongside marginalised communities, have expertise to help communities shift power and resources in these contexts.

Social workers are trained through their qualifying degrees in 3 non-hierarchal spheres of practice: undertaking case work and counselling with individuals and families (micropractice), community engagement and community development practice (meso-practice), and advocacy, policy, research and inter-agency practice (macro-practice). These spheres of social work practice accord with the development of bonding, bridging and linking social capital, concepts of sociological and social work origin which have been embraced by the disaster sector.

Social work theory recognises that human wellbeing is interdependent with the wellbeing of the planet, and that all forms of social work practice (and research) need to challenge the colonial, extractive, capitalistic, over-consumptive systems and ways which have shaped our deeply inequitable society, and which have indeed fuelled climate warming and ensuing disasters. If the systems which shape inequities and harm are not recognised and challenged throughout the entire disaster management cycle, prolonged disaster recovery processes will, at best, simply re-enforce the deeply inequitable status quo.

This four-staged research project (UNSW iRECS #7331), with support from Professor Kathryn Hay and Dr Katheryn Margaret Pascoe of Aotearoa, is being carried out across 2025 and aims to improve the understanding and recognition of social work as a profession within the disaster sector across Australia. This presentation will discuss the findings of this research project to date.

Ness Wiebford

Australian Red Cross

Empowering young leaders: building system-wide resilience through the Youth in Emergencies Development Program

System-wide problems require solutions that involve the participation of multiple stakeholders. In response to this, the Youth in Emergencies Development Program was developed as a two-year project led by the Australian Red Cross in collaboration with the Country Fire Service, Commissioner for Children and Young People, and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award.

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Speaker bio

Ness Wiebford (Australian Red Cross)

Ness Wiebford was the Project Lead for the Youth in Emergencies Development Program at Australian Red Cross. Ness views the world as a network of interrelated systems, focusing on how cross discipline collaboration can lead to positive outcomes for people and the environment.

With a Master of Community Development and Social Change, Ness is passionate about systemic change in social realms and applies complexity science to her work. With 20 years’ experience in community development and advocacy, she enjoys connecting with people from all walks of life and works to amplify diverse voices, particularly those with needs often not catered to or offered a seat at the table.

Ness is a strong advocate for the power of storytelling to inspire change and foster meaningful connections. She actively incorporates lived experience speakers into her initiatives and promotes genuine co-design in her projects.

Through her expertise in complexity science, Ness works to enhance emergency management systems via collaboration, advocacy, and improved education for children and young people.

Presentation outline

System-wide problems require solutions that involve the participation of multiple stakeholders. In response to this, the Youth in Emergencies Development Program (YEDP) was developed as a two-year project led by the Australian Red Cross (ARC) in collaboration with the Country Fire Service (CFS), Commissioner for Children and Young People (CCYP), and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award (DofE).

The project, initiated in 2023, engaged diverse groups of young people and involved state and local government, schools and educators, families, communities, emergency management agencies, health professionals, social service organisations, and the youth sector.

Students from diverse backgrounds were subsidised to complete the 6-month program, with 38 participants graduating in November 2024. The 6-month learning program equipped young people with the necessary skills to become active change-makers across various social systems. The program content was developed through genuine co-design with young people and showed participants how to understand systemic risks, building resilience to mitigate and adapt to those risks and leaderships and teamwork skills.

With the goal of increasing the number of communities resilient to disaster across South Australia, participants were required to develop and implement a project in the community of their choice that left them more prepared for emergencies. As a result, it is conservatively estimated that these projects reached approximately 1,400 people. This presentation will showcase the consultative process that led to the creation of the program and demonstrate how it empowered participants to drive change across various systems, with a particular focus on their voluntary projects. It will include video presentations from students reporting on their experiences and the monitoring and evaluation they built into their community projects.

The presentation will demonstrate how the program contributes to system-wide resilience and the importance of empowering young people, not just ‘future’ leaders but courageous, innovative leaders of today.

Dr Elizabeth Newnham
Curtin University

Kele Readhead
Curtin University

Shelby Robinson
Curtin University

Kushagra Rathore
Curtin University

Scott Wilson
Gevolve Solutions

Professor Lisa Gibbs
University of Melbourne

PANEL | Engaging young people in disaster resilience: transformative approaches for a safer future

Presentation outline TBC

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Speaker bios

Dr Elizabeth Newnham (Curtin University)

Dr. Elizabeth Newnham is an Associate Professor in the School of Population Health at Curtin University and a Program Lead at the enAble Institute. Her central research interests include the mental health consequences of trauma and adversity with a focus on evidence-based interventions for communities affected by disasters, climate change, and intergenerational trauma.

Dr. Newnham completed her Master of Clinical Psychology and PhD at the University of Western Australia and undertook postdoctoral research fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. She is the Principal Investigator for several multinational studies on disaster-related mental health.

Dr Newnham’s team were recently awarded a Highly Commended Resilient Australia Award for Crisis to Calm, a co-designed mental health intervention for young people affected by climate disasters in Australia. She is the Founding Director of the Asia Pacific Disaster Mental Health Network, supported by the World Health Organization. In 2024 Dr Newnham was awarded the Curtin enAble Institute Researcher of the Year Award for her innovative work in community co-design for disaster recovery.

Kele Readhead (Curtin University)

Kele graduated from Perth Modern School in 2024, marking culmination of a schooling journey that began in the country town of Boddington. Kele’s move to boarding school for his ATAR years, and 4 years in the WA Gifted and Talented Online program for country students, broadened his perspective through a diverse network of students across WA. Kele is now studying a combined Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Philosophy via an assured pathway to the Juris doctor at the University of WA.

Kele’s numerous leadership roles through school, sport, and community, led to selection for the inaugural WA Student Council (2022–24), representing 300,000 students, and the first Australian National Student Voice Council (2023–24), representing 4 million students. Kele also had an opportunity when selected as the sole WA student, to serve on a federal ministerial reference group through 2023-24, advising the Australian Department of Education on the National School Reform Agreement. These positions allowed Kele to contribute meaningfully to education policies at both state and national levels. He seeks to give back to rural communities in WA.

Shelby Robinson (Curtin University)

Shelby Robinson is a passionate leader in emergency management and peer support, dedicated to building resilient, community-informed systems across WA. With a background grounded in social services, Shelby blends practical emergency response knowledge with a trauma-informed, person-centered approach to community support and crisis navigation.

Shelby is deeply committed to integrating lived experience into emergency management practices across WA and has experience living, working and studying across much of regional WA, including the Metro, Pilbara, Kimberley, Wheatbelt and Goldfields.

Driven by values of equity and connection, Shelby continues to advocate for peer-led models that recognise people as experts in their own lives and essential partners in sustainable change.

Shelby’s approach emphasises the importance of community-informed strategies, ensuring that emergency management and peer support services are responsive to the unique needs of local populations. Her work exemplifies a commitment to fostering resilience through collaboration, mentorship, and the empowerment of individuals and communities.

Kushagra Rathore (Curtin University)

Kushagra (Kush) Rathore is a passionate youth advocate committed to amplifying young people’s voices in mental health, disaster resilience, and health equity. As a research assistant at Curtin University and co-chair of several national youth advisory groups, Kush has led and contributed to a range of youth-designed projects addressing the needs of disaster-affected communities, culturally diverse populations, and young people navigating mental health systems.

Kush brings extensive experience in youth co-design, systems advocacy, and stakeholder engagement. He is currently supporting the co-design and evaluation of Crisis to Calm — an innovative, youth-led mental health initiative for communities impacted by natural disasters. He has contributed to academic papers, co-authored policy briefs, supported national consensus-building efforts, and presented at a range of forums and program launches to advocate for community-driven approaches to health and recovery.

As a young person from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, Kush is deeply committed to ensuring that research and policy reflect diverse lived experiences. He regularly collaborates with researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to embed ethical co-design, cultural safety, and systems-level thinking into public health strategies. Through his work, Kush continues to advocate for a future where youth engagement is not only valued, but foundational to building resilient and inclusive communities.

Scott Wilson (Gevolve Solutions)

TBC

Professor Lisa Gibbs (University of Melbourne)

Lisa Gibbs is a Professor of Public Health and Director of the Disaster, Climate and Adversity Unit in Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at University of Melbourne. She leads an extensive applied research program investigating the health and wellbeing impacts of disasters, including a focus on the impacts of disaster and climate change for children, teachers and school communities.

She co-develops evidence-informed practical guidelines and resources with stakeholder partners to support optimum health and wellbeing outcomes. She is a sector leader, providing expert advice to leading disaster resilience agencies including World Health Organisation, Australian Red Cross, Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience and Departments of Education.

Presentation outline

Presentation outline TBC

Corinne Buxton

Wingecarribee Shire Council

Embedding resilience: a local government perspective on radical transformation

Disasters are becoming more intense, complex, and enduring, demanding a radical shift in how we understand and reduce risk. In one of the most disaster-affected local government areas in New South Wales, our council is rethinking resilience—not as a standalone task, but as an embedded, everyday practice across our communities. This presentation explores how local government can drive transformation through deep community connection, cross-sector collaboration, and culturally informed practice.

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Speaker bio

Corinne Buxton (Wingecarribee Shire Council)

Corinne is the Community Development Coordinator at Wingecarribee Shire Council, bringing a decade of experience in local government. Since 2021, she has led social recovery initiatives in one of the most disaster-affected regions in NSW, initially serving as Recovery Officer before transitioning into her current role.

Specialising in community engagement, disaster recovery and resilience planning, Corinne emphasises locally led, place-based approaches. Her work spans diverse communities, including arts and culture, disability, seniors, youth, and Aboriginal groups.

Following the Black Summer bushfires, Corinne played a pivotal role in driving internal reforms and fostering community-centred initiatives. She secured funding to establish a dedicated Community Resilience Officer position, enhancing the Council's capacity to support disaster impacted villages. Additionally, she initiated the development of 4 locally centred community resilience plans, with completion anticipated by 2026, aimed at informing regional adaptation planning.

Corinne is passionate about empowering communities to build resilience before, during, and after disasters. She views resilience as a shared, everyday practice rather than a standalone task, emphasising the importance of social capital and support for locally led initiatives.

Presentation outline

This presentation explores how local government can drive transformation through deep community connection, cross-sector collaboration, and culturally informed practice. With towns and villages spread across vast geography, investing in community relationships—particularly in regional settings—is not optional; it is foundational. The trust required to mobilise resilience is built slowly, especially where relationships were once fractured. Our experience shows that when key staff engage directly and consistently with communities, resilience becomes more than a strategy—it becomes shared practice.

I will share lessons learned from implementing 44 Council recommendations following the Black Summer bushfires, demonstrating how internal reform and community-led approaches can occur in parallel. Critical to our progress has been the inclusion of Aboriginal communities, young people, seniors, and people with disabilities—whose insights have shaped more adaptive, inclusive responses.

Arts and cultural initiatives are being used to foster psychological recovery, rebuild social cohesion, and elevate the voices of marginalised groups. These community-driven efforts are reshaping how resilience is understood and delivered, expanding beyond traditional emergency management to include social, cultural, and emotional dimensions.

This approach is grounded in the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, aligning particularly with:
• Priority 2 – Accountable Decisions: Embedding resilience in council decisions and planning processes.
• Priority 3 – Enhanced Investment: Recognising relationship-building and social capital as core to risk reduction.
• Priority 4 – Governance, Ownership and Responsibility: Supporting locally-led initiatives and clarifying roles across systems.

Radical transformation requires more than innovation—it demands courage to learn from mistakes, humility to rebuild trust, and imagination to act systemically. This session invites delegates into an honest discussion about the power of local knowledge, the role of culture, and the opportunities that come from rethinking resilience as something we build together, from the ground up.

Gemma Edwards

Bega Valley Shire Council

Radical transformation in local government: the pursuit of resilience through decision-making

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Speaker bio

Gemma Edwards is a strategist by trade and an anthropologist by training, currently working in local government on the south coast of New South Wales.

With a background in political anthropology and a passion for place-based systems change, she focuses on embedding resilience into how councils think, plan, and act.

Gemma began her career in regional Queensland, working on heritage revitalisation and economic development. There, she quickly discovered that turning good ideas into shared action was rarely as simple as it looked on paper. That experience sparked a curiosity about how decisions are made in complex systems, particularly within the often-overlooked machinery of local government.

She completed her master’s thesis at the Australian National University on decision-making in local councils under conditions of uncertainty and now leads strategic change initiatives at Bega Valley Shire Council. Her work combines ethnographic sensibility with practical system design to help organisations respond more thoughtfully and collaboratively to the challenges they face.

In this presentation, Gemma shares a case study of one council’s attempt to implement radical transformation, and, what happened next.

Presentation outline

This study explores the role of social and political processes in complex decision-making at the local government level, particularly in relation to transformational approaches to embedding 'resilience' within planning and decision-making processes to alter community outcomes. Using the Bega Valley Shire Council and CSIRO’s earlier pilot project, ‘Embedding the Enabling Resilience Investment (ERI) Approach in Bega Valley - Supporting Regional Scaling’, we reflect on the ERI approach, the process of its introduction and its impact on the organisation and reflect on the challenges and lessons encountered a year after the
project's conclusion.

I first outline the intricate systems shaping local government decision-making, highlighting the politics of planning—how decisions are influenced not only by technical considerations but also by political viability, competing imperatives, and entrenched social dynamics. Next, I critically examine the ERI as a practical tool for identifying public and private values, beneficiaries, and investment pathways for resilience. I then reflect on the challenges of operationalising this transformational approach within the constraints of local government, including the temporal nature of political cycles, the rigidity of existing parameters, and the limitations of technocratic solutions. Finally, I explore how these insights can inform local governments seeking to embrace radical transformation, enhance governance through participation, and deliver public value in politically uncertain contexts.

This study provides a critical perspective on resilience-building, advocating for deliberate actions that challenge the status quo, navigate complexity, and redefine 'success' in decision-making. Rather than offering definitive answers, we reflect on the lessons learned from implementing ‘resilience building’ initiatives and pose critical questions about how we might better facilitate radical transformation despite systemic constraints—positioning the pursuit of resilience as a catalyst for broader social and political change.

Emily Harper
Denmark Bushfire Ready

Murray Brooker
Denmark Bushfire Ready

Sally Ingham
Denmark Bushfire Ready

From little (local) things, big things grow: a whole-of-town approach to bushfire and emergency preparedness

This presentation introduces a collaborative model for rural bushfire preparedness, developed by the Denmark WA Bushfire Ready Facilitators. The model unites the entire town for an annual three-day 'Bushfire Ready Weekend,' engaging all demographics and landholders in proactive bushfire risk reduction.

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Speaker bios

Emily Harper (Denmark Bushfire Ready)

Emily has been a Clinical Psychologist for almost 20 years, with additional postgraduate training in disaster and emergency management, focusing on community disaster resilience. She is also a volunteer firefighter and is Captain and Fire Control Officer of her local brigade.

Emily has extensive experience in community engagement, community co-design methodologies and community education program development, as well as program evaluation and research. She integrates her knowledge of human emotion, relationships, behaviour and motivation for change with her passion for disaster risk reduction, with a particular interest in identifying simple strategies that engage individuals and communities across all generations, from very young children to the elderly.

Murray Brooker (Denmark Bushfire Ready)

Murray is an experienced volunteer firefighter, a Fire Compliance Officer, and Lead Bushfire Ready Facilitator for the Shire of Denmark (WA) - as well as a Curtin University lecturer in teaching, with a background in primary school teaching. He is also a highly qualified Karate and Jujitsu coach and runs a thriving Karate club in Denmark for kids and adults.

Drawing on his education and coaching expertise, his extensive community networks and local knowledge, and his passion for community preparedness, and building on the Department of Fire and Emergency Service WA Bushfire Ready suite of resources.

Murray developed a unique 'Denmark Bushfire Ready Weekend' model of community engagement and education for small rural communities. This program is now entering its fourth year of delivery.

Sally Ingham (Denmark Bushfire Ready)

Sally is a professionally trained social worker and family therapist. She has worked with clients with significant trauma and has seen first-hand the impact of trauma on individuals’ wellbeing, family relationships and dynamics, and on the wider community. Sally volunteers as a Bushfire Ready Facilitator and a Bushfire Brigade member and is a key member of the Denmark Bushfire Ready Facilitator Steering Group, helping to shape the ‘Denmark approach’ to community engagement.

She is committed to working with community members to help them plan and prepare for bushfire, to increase their capacity to recover from disasters and to reduce the likelihood of long-term trauma.

Presentation outline

Extending the WA Bushfire Ready suite of resources, this volunteer-driven, scalable initiative strengthens local connections and fosters a whole-of-community approach, offering an adaptable, replicable template for all rural areas. The model uses simple solutions to engage high risk groups who are typically underrepresented in local emergency preparedness, such as weekend residents, holiday accommodation owners and tourists, as well as the elderly and those with extra care needs.

At the heart of this model are intergenerational activities that bring together local businesses, individuals, families and emergency services, with a strong emphasis on accessibility. In line with key principles of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, we address the growing climate-driven risks facing rural communities.

The outcomes of applying a consistent structure over three years include progress in 3 key areas:

Enhancing local property preparedness, awareness and safety practices, reducing accidental bushfire ignitions and relieving pressure on emergency services.
Embedding a culture of resilience across all generations, from very young children through to the elderly to drive adaptation to climate change.
Revitalising local volunteerism, reinvigorating emergency services and addressing the decline in volunteer participation.

The Denmark Bushfire Ready model demonstrates the power of collective effort and community collaboration. We hope to inspire attendees to adapt these strategies in their own communities and across all hazards, fostering a sustainable, disaster-resilient future. From 'Denmark Bushfire Ready', we propose that together, we can build 'Australia: Disaster Ready'.

Jacob West
Western Australian Council of Social Service

Wendy Sun
DOHWA

Erin Fuery
Dept of Communities

Addressing and understanding heat vulnerability: the importance of a cross-sector approach

Heat is recognised as the deadliest disaster in Australia, with climate change fuelling hotter heatwaves in the coming years. Heatwaves cause significant damages to social, mental, economic, and population health across Western Australian communities, leading to more deaths and hospital admissions than any other hazard.

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Speaker bios

Jacob West (Western Australian Council of Social Service)

Jacob is the Project Coordinator on the Heat Vulnerability Project and recently began a new role as Project Manager on the Changes to Country project at Murdoch University. His background spans tertiary mental health services, youth work, residential care, and research institutions — experience that informs his commitment to supporting diverse communities through inclusive resilience and recovery planning. Jacob is especially focused on ensuring policy development reflects the strengths and needs of historically underrepresented groups.

Prior to moving into the climate and community sector in 2020, he worked as a chef from the age of 14, gaining practical experience in teamwork, discipline, and service. His career shift reflects a broader dedication to systems of care grounded in cultural respect and lived experience.

Wendy Sun (DOHWA)

TBC

Erin Fuery (Dept of Communities)

TBC

Presentation outline

Over the past 2 years Western Australian Council of Social Service, in partnership with the WA Department of Communities and Department of Health, has worked on a project to map where existing heat vulnerable populations are across WA while piloting heat interventions in three different local governments. This project is funded through the National Disaster Risk Reduction funding scheme.

The 3 WA pilot sites for this project, Town of Port Hedland, City of Rockingham, and Shire of Bridgetown-Greenbushes, represent different levels of heat exposure, types of population vulnerabilities, and levels of rurality. At each site the local governments, community organisations, service providers, and community members are consulted to inform which heat interventions were selected. In the summer of 2024-25, the project launched various interventions including chilled water fountains, educational sessions, purposeful shading, and daytime cooling spaces. Throughout these interventions community organisations and local governments worked together to reduce the impacts from high heat.

Simultaneously the project culminates in the release of the state-wide heat vulnerability map, serving to inform local governments of their heat vulnerability and factors contributing to their vulnerability. This project seeks to align state-level understanding of where populations are vulnerable to increasing periods of high heat with the location-specific approaches to addressing heat vulnerabilities done in pilot sites. The learnings from this project will culminate in recommendations released by the end of June 2025.

Emma Bacon
Sweltering Cities

Eilish Maguire
Australian Red Cross

Kelly Gee
Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils

Dr Shannon Rutherford
Griffith University

PANEL | Collaborating for ambitious heatwave resilience and adaptation

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Speaker bios

Emma Bacon (Sweltering Cities)

Emma Bacon is the Founder and Executive Director of Sweltering Cities, Australia’s national community voice for heat safety. Since the beginning of 2020 Sweltering Cities has connected with thousands of people around the country, working directly with communities in our hottest suburbs to campaign and advocate for more liveable, equitable and sustainable cities.

Emma is a passionate organiser, campaigner and activist. She has worked across movements for social and environmental justice for over 14 years on campaigns including an international asbestos ban, 10 cent deposits on bottles and cans, and union campaigns with shopping centre cleaners. She has run successful political campaigns and been part of winning significant outcomes for progressive change at local to international levels.

Emma is committed to building a broad movement for climate justice.

Emma lives and works on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi wurrung people.

Eilish Maguire (Australian Red Cross)

Eilish is the lead of the Urban Climate Resilience Program for Australian Red Cross, where she plays a critical role in building community and individual resilience to climate-related disasters. Throughout her career Eilish has been an advocate for vulnerable communities and has worked to support those most at risk.

While working at Red Cross she has coordinated response efforts to support at-risk individuals throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and during extreme heatwaves. Her background in community development, project management and advocacy has enabled her to make a meaningful impact on the humanitarian sector.

Kelly Gee (Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils)

Kelly Gee is policy lead at the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC); a membership organisation representing local government in Western Sydney. With a background in public relations and policy development, Kelly specialises in working collaboratively with government, industry, academic, and community sector partners to translate complex policy and research questions into practical action.

Since 2016, Kelly has worked on WSROC’s award-winning Heat Resilience Program which seeks a collaborative, multi-sector approach to heat resilience in Western Sydney. Most recently, this has included assessing the climate resilience of Australian building codes, supporting integration of heat resilience into planning controls, developing new risk assessment models, and working directly with communities to build heatwave preparedness.

In 2023-24 Kelly was part of the Greater Sydney Heat Taskforce delivery team, which led the development of Sydney’s first coordinated approach to heat risk management; the Heat Smart City Plan.

Dr Shannon Rutherford (Griffith University)

With a background in environmental science, and through research and government public health roles, Shannon’s career has focussed on researching the links between environmental change and human health and building capacity to understand and respond at local, national and global levels. She has been involved in research to solve diverse climate influenced public health problems across diverse geographical settings, from mosquito-borne diseases in Kenya and Bangladesh, heat stress impacts of RMG factory workers and heat communication for older persons in Queensland to disasters and climate change governance in Philippines and Indonesia.

Her work has influenced research and policy in disaster and climate health, advancing the recognition of the health impacts in preparing and responding to climate change related extreme events. This experience has developed her expertise and passion for conducting multi-disciplinary research with strong co-design and policy maker engagement, including the current transdisciplinary Ethos (Extreme heat and older persons) project. She is currently a co-lead of the Queensland Heat and Health Community of Practice and is leading two new initiatives on heat – a HEAL funded whole of Australia exploration of heat and health research and policy interaction and a National Emergency Management Agency funded Queensland heat resilience and surveilliance project.

Panel outline

New cross-sector collaborations are emerging to tackle extreme heat, addressing both the root causes of vulnerability, practical preparedness and the urgent need for adaptation. These initiatives recognise that heat risk is shaped by economic, social, and geographic inequalities, requiring solutions that bridge both acute and systemic challenges. By fostering partnerships across government, industry, academia, and community organisations, these collaborations are laying the groundwork for ambitious and transformative adaptation and resilience strategies.

This session will explore how 3 major collaborations are reshaping heat resilience in Australia. First, Sweltering Cities and the Australian Red Cross coordinated the 2025 Extreme Heat Awareness Day, the first national heat-focused action, engaging over 100 organisations and hundreds of individuals. Second, Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils and Resilient Sydney launched the Greater Sydney Heat Taskforce and the Heat Smart City Plan in 2024, driving forward over 40 recommendations across emergency management, housing, infrastructure, and community engagement. Now, partners are working together to realise the recommendations. Finally, the Queensland Heat Health Community of Practice led by Griffith University has united experts and practitioners from health, law, the built environment, and infrastructure to advance statewide heat resilience efforts.

The panel will explore the successes and challenges of working across sectors, the most radical and ambitious strategies emerging from these collaborations, and the critical next steps to accelerate Australia’s adaptation to a hotter future.

Dr Bruce Buckley

IAG/NRMA Insurance Meteorologist

Severe weather in a changing climate

Each year extreme weather events turn into disasters, exposing Australian communities to hazards like severe thunderstorms, tropical cyclones, bushfires, and floods. While these events cannot be prevented, better preparation, assistance during events, and expedited recovery can mitigate their impact. Greater investment in resilience, adaptation, and mitigation planning from governments, businesses, community organisations, and individuals is essential to reduce the physical, economic, and social recovery costs following disasters. Recent catastrophic weather events highlight the urgent need for such measures.

Dr Bruce Buckley will present new climate research developed by IAG/NRMA Insurance in conjunction with national and international research bodies, addressing how climate change is affecting the severity, frequency, and geographical distribution of extreme weather events in Australia.

This research builds on IAG/NRMA Insurance's previously published reports: Severe weather in a changing climate 1st and 2nd edition.

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Speaker bio

Dr Bruce Buckley (IAG/NRMA)

Bruce is a meteorologist and climatologist with 48 years’ experience. He has been involved in IAG’s Natural Perils and Climate Change Research, including development of hail, tropical cyclone and flood models, as well as the significant weather reporting. His key areas of interest include tropical cyclones, severe thunderstorms, including hailstorms, mid latitude extreme weather systems and climate change issues.

He has had prior experience working for the Bureau of Meteorology in various roles in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, the United Nations Development Program and Austrade in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as Chief Meteorologist for The Weather Channel and The Weather Company, as well as an environmental advisor for BHP. He has been involved in climate change research with IAG, Woodside Energy and Rio Tinto.

He has co-authored 5 books and has numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications. He was the Team Meteorologist for the Australian Sailing Team’s London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics campaigns and worked with the Japanese Sailing Team for the 2020 Olympics. He appeared to the documentary and book ‘A Fire Inside’ which focussed upon the extreme community impacts of the Black Summer 2019-20 fires.

Presentation outline

Presentation outline TBC

Timothy McNaught
Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA

Tristan Whiting
Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage

Douglas Radford
The University of Adelaide

UNHaRMED: developing disaster risk reduction strategies through partnerships, workshops and integrated modelling of future risks

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Speaker bios

Timothy McNaught (Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA)

TBC

Tristan Whiting (Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage)

Tristan has worked in emergency management roles across multiple Australian states since 2009, with experience spanning all 4 phases of disaster risk reduction: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. His work in recovery sparked a strong interest in how the planning system can play a more active role in prevention, particularly in reducing long-term community risk and vulnerability.

Tristan is passionate about shifting focus toward proactive, place-based risk mitigation and believes there is significant untapped value in using planning tools to build safer, more resilient and livable communities.

Douglas Radford (The University of Adelaide)

Doug contributes to improving the resilience of social, infrastructure and environmental systems against the complex risks associated with natural hazards and climate variability. Doug's post-graduate research applies robust environmental modelling approaches to quantify these risks, with an interest in optimising risk management activities in order to protect social, economic and environmental values. Through his work, Doug hopes to shed light on how our objectives and values influence what we might consider a ‘good’ decision, and how we can come together with this knowledge to make better decisions.

With formal education across engineering and finance and a passion for solving social and environmental challenges, Doug brings a holistic, systems-orientated mindset to his research.

Presentation outline

Natural hazards pose a significant risk to societies and the things they value. This risk will likely increase in the future for diverse reasons, including a changing climate, urban development, and changing community profiles. To improve a society’s resilience to the impacts of disasters, it is essential to understand the range of potential future conditions, and the associated key uncertainties, so that holistic disaster risk management strategies can be designed to account for these drivers and their interactions.

For this purpose, we have developed a spatially explicit, dynamic, multi-hazard decision support system called UNHaRMED, which calculates dynamic risk profiles as a combination of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. The aim of UNHaRMED is to better understand current and future risk, and assess the impact of risk reduction strategies under various future conditions. To achieve this, UNHaRMED consists of coupled models integrated into a policy support system. It allows the user to understand the impact of climate change, socioeconomic developments and risk reduction strategies on the future evolution of exposure, hazard and vulnerability and hence the resulting risk.

The use of UNHaRMED is illustrated through applications in different regions of Australia, including WA, for wildfire and flood risk. In each application, we simulated a range of futures using different climate and socio-economic scenarios. In different regions, different drivers are responsible for increasing risk. For example, we found that in an area undergoing rapid urbanisation, the impact of socio-economic development exceeds the impact of climate change, and enhanced spatial planning strategies can substantially reduce future risk.

UNHaRMED showcases its potential in better understanding future uncertainties and leveraging this information to assess the impact of risk reduction strategies under plausible future conditions. Outputs from this process can inform policy and planning decisions and the design of robust and adaptive risk management strategies.

Fyowna Norton
Australian Red Cross

Imeshi Weerasinghe
WEO SAS

Lauren Hicks
QBE

From insight to action: co-designing technology-enabled community resilience in a changing climate

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Speaker bios

Fyowna Norton (Australian Red Cross)

Fyowna Norton is a practice professional with over 27 years’ experience in the humanitarian, public, and private sector. Holding bachelor’s degrees in social work and arts/science, Fyowna has had a diverse career spanning emergency management, workforce reform, economic development, child protection, mother baby mental health, and as Director of a successful private business in the fitness industry.

Fyowna has authored for the Routledge International Handbook for Social Work and Disaster Practice, co-authored journal papers, presented at national and international conferences, and is a national marketing award winner. Currently Victorian State Manager Programs at the Australian Red Cross, Fyowna is responsible for leading and implementing effective state-wide delivery, capability development, advocacy to promote the importance of humanitarian impacts; and drive reform that delivers better outcomes for all people.

Imeshi Weerasinghe (WEO SAS)

Imeshi Weerasinghe is the co-founder and CEO of WEO, a European-based company using satellite data and AI to strengthen climate and disaster resilience. She combines a technical background in water resource engineering with business leadership experience to deliver scalable, data-driven solutions for humanitarian and development partners.

Her research has focused on the use of remote sensing to improve environmental monitoring, particularly in data-scarce regions. Her academic and field experience spans Africa, Asia, and Europe, with projects addressing groundwater, surface water, and urban climate challenges.

In addition to her scientific credentials, she holds qualifications in business and innovation, which underpin her leadership of WEO as it grows from a research-driven startup into a global provider of environmental analytics. Under her direction, WEO has partnered with organizations like the Australian Red Cross to support anticipatory action and community resilience in vulnerable regions.

Imeshi is passionate about making complex environmental data accessible and actionable —particularly for those on the frontlines of climate risk. Her work bridges science, technology, and policy to help communities anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to environmental shocks.

Lauren Hicks (QBE)

TBC

Presentation outline

Transformation in how technology and local knowledge intersect to build community resilience in a changing environment is innovation at its core. The Dargo Climate Change Adaptation pilot, a collaboration between the Dargo community, Australian Red Cross, WEO SAS (Luxembourg-based satellite analytics company), and the LOTE Agency, represents this transformation. Integrating advanced satellite analytics with a community-led co-design process, the pilot ensures that technological innovations enable community-driven resilience efforts, rather than dictate them.

The pilot addresses critical gaps in disaster resilience: the accessibility of trustworthy, local risk information, and the translation of state, national and global data. Traditional approaches often fail to bridge scientific data with local insights, leading to fragmented solutions and missed opportunities for proactive, community-led action.

Through co-design workshops and platform engagement, the community share real-time and lived-experience sharing, identify priority assets, and refine risk mitigation strategies. This participatory process ensures the platform remains user-friendly regardless of digital literacy levels and fosters a sense of local ownership.

Features include dynamic risk mapping, identification of remediation actions, local knowledge integration, and review of proposed solutions. Community can contribute insights, assess local social capital, and document past successful interventions. This iterative engagement empowers residents to understand risks, prioritise actions, and measure impact of efforts, reinforcing collective resilience.

The Dargo pilot showcases the transformative potential of integrating technology with meaningful community participation in resilience building activities at scale. Scaling impact through innovation is complex, iterative and takes time and deep collaboration but enables greater reach and deepens the impact in the lives of affected communities.

This presentation will share insights on usability, engagement, and implications of codesigning
resilience solutions, demonstrating that technology and agencies working together can create more equitable and resilient communities.

Second National Action Plan Priority 4.
National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework Priority 1.
Second National Action plan Priority 1.

Linda Ellen Greenalgh
Auckland Council

Jewelz Petley
Te Kawerau a Maki

WORKSHOP | Restoring Mana through radical transformation: navigating disaster recovery with Hautū Waka

Te Kawerau ā Maki are a West Auckland based iwi with shared interests across the northern half of the region. They are the mana whenua (people of the land) of Nga Rau Pou Tā Maki, and descend from the earliest inhabitants of the area.

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Workshop outline

The 5 severe weather events of 2023 had a devastating impact on the rohe (territory) of Te Kawerau a Maki and revealed systemic failures that excluded Indigenous leadership in disaster response. This exclusion not only undermined their cultural obligation to exercise kaitiakitanga (maintenance and protection of people, environment, and treasured objects) and manaakitanga (hospitality, kindness, generosity, support) but also exposed inequities in the disaster response system.

This workshop addresses the urgent need to radically transform disaster recovery frameworks, ensuring that Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge are fully integrated in future response and recoveries.

This interactive workshop will explore the lessons learned from Te Kawerau ā Maki and Auckland Council's experience and introduce Hautū Waka, a navigational framework grounded in Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge system), as a way to navigate the complexity of disaster recovery.

Hautū Waka is more than just a tool for disaster recovery—it is a radical transformation of how we approach resilience. By integrating Mātauranga Māori into decision-making, Hautū Waka reshapes the future of disaster recovery to prioritize Indigenous leadership and intergenerational equity. It offers a transformative shift from reactive systems to proactive, inclusive frameworks that ensure the mana (autonomy, authority) of tangata whenua (people of the land) is not only preserved but uplifted.

This session invites practitioners, policymakers, and leaders to embrace radical transformation by integrating Indigenous frameworks into their disaster recovery strategies. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for embedding Indigenous leadership in resilience planning, ensuring that future responses honour the sovereignty of tangata whenua and build long-term wellbeing for all.

Dr Hayley Squance

Hayley Squance Ltd

The power of connection: Embracing transformation through the interdependencies of people, animals, and the environment

Disasters do not occur in isolation. Neither do their impacts or responses. The intricate connections between people, animals, and the environment shape how communities experience, respond to, and recover from emergencies. Yet traditional disaster frameworks often separate these elements, missing the opportunity to harness their interdependencies for greater resilience.

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Speaker bio

Dr Hayley Squance (Hayley Squance Ltd)

Dr Hayley Squance is an expert in animal emergency management known for her translational leadership, bridging research, policy, operational experience, and community insight to drive meaningful change. With a background in veterinary science and a PhD in Emergency Management, she specialises in navigating the complexities of disasters where people, animals, and the environment are deeply interconnected.

Hayley spent 5 years as New Zealand’s National Animal Welfare Emergency Management Coordinator and led the establishment of the Massey University Veterinary Emergency Response Team, the first of its kind in Australasia. Her expertise has been sought globally, including by the World Organisation for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and INTERPOL, to help build international veterinary emergency capability.

As a keynote speaker, author, and advisor, Hayley draws on her experience working in high-stakes environments to shift thinking, challenge silos, and champion adaptive systems that support both human and animal wellbeing. Her work explores the power of connection, within ourselves, between each other, and with the natural world, as a catalyst for transformation.

Presentation outline

This presentation will explore how embracing these connections can drive radical transformation in disaster resilience. It will highlight how human decision-making, animal welfare, and environmental health are deeply intertwined and how disruptions in one domain create ripple effects across others. Using real-world examples, we will examine how disasters can be a catalyst for reimagining preparedness, response, and recovery, moving beyond siloed approaches to foster integrated, adaptive solutions.

By challenging linear thinking and embracing systems-based approaches, we can shift from reactive strategies to proactive, transformative change. From empowering community champions to reshaping policies and fostering cross-sector collaboration, this session will illustrate how strengthening connections between people, animals, and the environment can build a more resilient and sustainable future for all.

Dr Kate Lee
Arthur Rylah Institute, DEECA

Nina O'Brien
Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal

The nature-led community resilience toolkit: including people and nature in emergency management

Societies internationally are recognising the urgent need for radical transformation in our relationships with nature. Our natural world is changing rapidly, and increasing severity and frequency of disasters are affecting communities around the globe. Nature-led community resilience, the reciprocal connecting and healing of people and nature in recovering from disasters, overlaps these important global issues.

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Speaker bios

Dr Kate Lee (Arthur Rylah Institute, DEECA)

TBC

Nina O'Brien (Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal)

Living within a stone’s throw of the Murray River (Dhungala), and witnessing it in flood during recent years, has provided a sobering lived experience to Nina’s day job of leading the portfolio of national grant programs and in-community development work at the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR) that supports regional communities to recover from and prepare for disasters and other climate impacts across regional Australia.

Last year FRRR awarded $25.4 million to support more than 1,100 local community-based organisations, of which nearly half related to disasters or weather events. Prior to her work at FRRR, Nina has worked in regional communities across NSW, Victoria and remote SA to strengthen the social fabric of small regional communities and localities for some 25 years.

Presentation outline

Societies internationally are recognising the urgent need for radical transformation in our relationships with nature. Our natural world is changing rapidly, and increasing severity and frequency of disasters are affecting communities around the globe. Nature-led community resilience (NLCR), the reciprocal connecting and healing of people and nature in recovering from disasters, overlaps these important global issues.

NLCR is an approach to emergency management benefitting people and nature: when people connect with and support nature’s recovery, they are supported in their own recovery with renewed hope for the future. By working with decision makers and affected communities to coordinate these overlapping priorities, we can build resilience, adaptive capacity, and preparedness, minimising the potential impact of hazards.

NLCR intersects emergency management, biodiversity protection, community engagement, self-determination and human wellbeing, requiring a collective approach. Recognising this, we, a multi institutional government, academic, and practice team, developed a toolkit to support users across government, the private sector, the non-government sector, communities and individuals. We worked with groups in a region in Victoria and beyond, to connect research, projects and people; gather stories about NLCR work already happening; and identify individual and collective actions. These stories provide inspirational and tangible examples of NLCR activities that are making a difference for communities and
nature.

The Australian-first Nature-led Community Resilience Toolkit aligns with the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, the Second National Action Plan for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. It addresses human and nature trauma, incorporating nature-based initiatives into disaster resilience. It reinforces community values and leadership capabilities, fostering community participation through volunteering and enhancing local understanding of disaster risks and resilience-building measures for nature. It supports communities to identify, understand and take meaningful, informed and collaborative action in realising their responsibility as custodians of local
natural environments.

The Australian Disaster Resilience Conference 2024 is proudly supported by IAG.