Opening Address by Mr Andrew Gissing, the CEO of Natural Hazards Research Australia at Australasia’s largest and most comprehensive emergency management conference and exhibition called AFAC24, which is taking place in Sydney from September 3rd to 6th, 2024.
Good morning to you all you. I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of land which we are on today, and pay respect to their elders, past, present and emerging.
I also, on a day that we're going to be talking about research and science, reflect on the value of First Nations science and perspectives in the work that we do now and into our future as well. Also want to welcome to Sydney, my hometown. Thank you for being here. I think that's a good thing to be here today, because you are part of conversations, as Rob was alluding to, about shaking our future and how research and science will assist to build future policy and capability change, which is needed to ensure that we have safer, more resilient, sustainable communities into our future.
It is absolutely true that our communities are facing worsening natural hazard threats into our future. Research shows that in our future will have widening impacts across our society and financial systems that will have potential for communities to be living in an endless state of preparation and recovery, that will see greater complexities of emergencies and catastrophes, rising insurance and affordability, increased impacts on physical and mental health, change in vulnerabilities in greater species and habitat loss.
These changes will result in greater demand for disaster management capabilities across Australia and internationally, but these are already under stress from rising frequency and severity of disaster impacts, and we're also seeing a greater interest in disaster management by non-traditional partners. Doing more is no longer sufficient to ensure that our communities will be safe, sustainable and resilient in the future. Small step changes will not get us there either, as Rob was encouraging us all to think big, we do need to do exactly that. We need to evolve our approach just as our natural hazard risk continues to worsen into the future
There are also many policy questions that we need to look to answer through days like today and their ongoing research programs. For example, how can insurance be made more affordable? How is resilience best built back after a disaster? Should we be rebuilding communities in the same ways that we do after disasters? What is the future of communities’ face with increasing frequencies of extremes, how much mitigation investment is required and where? What is the sustainable workforce model for our emergency management and resilient sector workforces? And how can First Nations people be empowered to strengthen and protect landscapes and communities and many, many more policy questions which are which are open to the influence of research and science to build a more resilient future.
It is clear, no matter your job title, you have a role in being here today, and you have a role in building a more resilient and sustainable future for our communities through a multidisciplinary approach which brings not only researchers into the room, it brings our end user partners, government, emergency services, businesses, communities, all in the room together to work together.
Research and Innovation is the opportunity to be embraced to make step changes to strategic policy and capability to ensure that we are future ready, we should consider them as force multipliers. Research solves problems and drives capability into the future. There must be an urgency and ambition to our work to ensure that science can inform policy and capability to ensure safer, more resilient and sustainable communities.
So today, I aim to provide an overview about the work that natural hazards research Australia is doing, to provide you with that background. But before I do that, I do want to acknowledge an important milestone in the Commonwealth's investment in natural hazards research. So, this year, essentially, our census investment turned 21 so the bushfire, CRC, with the bush CRP, and now three years into natural research Australia. So that's 21 years of Commonwealth investment, and I want to congratulate everybody who's been part of that, because that's not just about us as staff members of the centre. That's about you, you as people that participate and build this research science and evidence.
We’ve had more than 700 researchers involved over those 21 years. It's the end users of that research, the agencies, it's the government departments, it's the businesses, it's the communities that have been involved over that journey to build so many great outcomes in terms of research informed policy and capability in our space. It is also the student cohort that we've been able to build in terms of future workforce. So, we've had over 300 students go through the various versions of the centre over 21 years. So, there's some amazing statistics there. The other one I want to reflect on is the value of today. So yes, this is the 30th anniversary of this conference, but today is 18 years of this particular research day, which was born out of the bushfire CRC, and has continued as a fantastic way to translate and communicate research across our network.
Our vision as natural as a research Australia is that communities will be safe and more resilient and sustainable in the future, and the way that we do that is about creating research, which is useful, usable and used. We're all about impact. We are not about producing journal papers in the best publications, though that is nice, we are about creating real world impact which is going to make our community safer and more resilient. We work with many organizations. This slide shows the breadth of the organizations that the centre is formally engaged with, as participants, as end user participants. The centre now has 32 different end user participants. This has grown in the last 12 months as we've worked on the Western Australian government, the Northern Territory Government and fire risk with Victoria and EMV into the cohort there as well. These participants drive the end user focus of our research. They put forward research ideas with funding and that we're able to then prioritize and be able to allocate funding to those through our processes, so far, we've been able to fund about a third of the submissions that have come our way. We've had just under 100 submissions from end users for various research proposals, research institutions that we're working with. There's 47 of those on that slide there. Just want to put these up, just to show again, the variety across the country, the various institutions and the multidisciplinary nature of our research.
So, in terms of achievements, the Senate turned three years old at the end of June this year, still very young, but we have an impressive array of different projects and scholarships that we have now planted. I use this analogy of planting the seeds, as we've planted many seeds, and now we're starting to see those seedlings grow, and over the next few years, as those projects progress, we'll see that kind of maturity and blossom. And we've had 67 core research programs, projects where we've been able to allocate funding, which is about $21 million worth in total, and we'll continue to allocate funding through our investment rounds over the future years as well. It is exciting to really think about the potential that these projects will have in the future as the collaboration between end users and researchers grow into the future. We're supporting all the actions that are in the second national action plan.
We're also supporting the implementation of various royal commission recommendations and expanding the international networks and connections that our research has. We're also extending the reach and communication and translations research. Last year, we supported just over 90 events which reached 13,000 people across the country. And we've also now run three natural hazard research forums and encourage you to get along to those in the future. The centre has also contributed strategic advice to real world policy questions various submissions, and of course, being requested to provide advice on various policy questions from government. Evaluation of our natural hazards research portfolio is certainly showing and demonstrating positive impact. In fact, when we look at the economic impact of the research investment, for every dollar spent, we're seeing a $6 return.
But in essence, our program of work is about building solutions for the future. So firstly, solutions to understand risk through research, to improve capabilities such as seasonal outlook for flooding, forecast for heavy rain flash flooding, tools to better understand evaluate resilience of communities and push by impact based forecasting, plus more in the managed risk space, through research that will improve evidence around the ethnic and severe or firefighting evidence to inform resilience investment decisions such as buybacks and retrofitting, land use planning, construct construction standards, informing the future of warning systems and the Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) as well, plus many more, and then in the engaged community and recovery areas of.
Solutions around communication of risk, engaging with communities, recruitment and retention, emergency service, workforce, support of indigenous knowledge and capability, federating recovery at a community level and temporary accommodation and again, plus many more under that thing, we know that our research is being used, which is absolutely the key part of our mission. We can see that through the research informed Emergency Management doctrine that's produced by people like the Australian Institute of disaster resilience, through the Australian through the Australian Disaster Resilience index, which is highly used throughout the country and internationally
And then just finally, just a final slide, it's important that we encourage participation from everybody. The success of natural hazard research, not only in our centre, but more broadly, relies on this ecosystem of end users and researchers coming together and building relationships, sharing ideas and sharing data, sharing information, translating that into use. And so, I encourage you throughout today and throughout the conference to be connecting with one another, to be staying abreast of the journey of NHRA and participating in that journey. So, from a natural research Australia perspective, thank you again for being here today and all the very best.
