The Climate Assessment Report and emergency management…
In this article, Barbara Ryan looks at what the Australian National Climate Risk Assessment means for emergency management – and it isn’t more fire trucks and flood boats.
The National Climate Risk Assessment and its technical reports have crystallised a number of big risks for emergency management agencies in Australia this week.
The report goes beyond predicting cascading, multi-hazard events that we are already becoming familiar with and delves into nuance that will be important for agency planning.
Working through it with a foresight lens, there are many pointers to ensuring emergency agencies’ capabilities keep up with the rate of change we are expecting. And it will mean staffing agencies with creative thinkers to balance out the heavy reliance on process-oriented employees.
Organisational agility (not previously a strength for emergency agencies) will be key. This will support how agencies can deal with the other challenges that emerge from this report, like the importance of social contracts with and health and wellbeing for volunteers and staff, the importance of keeping ahead of rapidly increasing community expectations and at the same time maintaining trust, and the importance of foresight in future organisational planning.
Let’s work through what the report shows us.
Organisational agility and structural reconfiguration
Futures thinking spotlights slow-changing institutional cultures as critical vulnerabilities in the current climate change environment, not just for emergency agencies. To absorb cascading, multi-hazard events, agencies will need to:
To flatten hierarchies and decentralise authority for more effective local adaptation, moving away from traditional command-and-control models during large-scale, complex cascading disasters. Trusting communities to step up will be hard in this command-and-control environment, but critically important.
Build in “excess” or surge capacity on a permanent basis to reframe resilience as an everyday capability rather than a special surge event. All despite financial challenges to doing this. “BAU” needs to take on new meaning right now.
Ramp up knowledge management transformation: high churn rates, diverse volunteer backgrounds, and reliance on informal digital tools will challenge agencies’ ability to retain, transfer, and operationalise critical experiential knowledge. Agencies need to finally nail effective lessons management and integration.
Erosion of the Volunteer Social Contract
The traditional model of sustained volunteer engagement is under a great deal of strain, shown by declining volunteerism, altered demographics, changing models of volunteering and rising community and volunteer expectations of personal safety and flexibility.
The recently released results of the Inquiry into Volunteering in Queensland and its Rural Fire Service and State Emergency Service case studies show how this looks right now and why agencies need to adopt radically new expectations of volunteers and systems to support them:
Emergence of "episodic volunteering" over long-service commitment, requiring adaptive training, rapid onboarding technology, and flexible rostering.
Growing significance of informal, unaffiliated volunteer groups and spontaneous “crisis volunteering” that can both complement and interrupt formal response networks.
Significant legal and insurance complexities as established risk frameworks struggle to accommodate highly distributed, less formal volunteer participation. This needs to be balanced with the volunteer need for low levels of bureaucracy.
Deeper health, wellbeing and liability pressures
Beyond the better-known frontline heat risks to firefighters and longer periods of intense rescue efforts for SES responders, there will be more long-term psychosocial impacts—fatigue, trauma, moral injury, and caring burdens—particularly as crisis duration and complexity outstrip support structures.
Innovation will be needed to cope with:
Rising liability risks for agencies as cumulative psychological harm to staff and volunteers, not just acute physical risk, becomes normalised.
Need for continuous investment in psychological PPE, organisational culture change, and wellbeing resources equivalent to traditional physical PPE.
Increased attrition in leadership layers, where expectations outpace personal and family tolerance for sustained pressure, resulting in institutional memory loss. Families of volunteers will be key here.
Fracturing community expectations and trust
The most difficult implication to deal with will be keeping ahead of community expectations around agencies’ abilities to respond.
The gaps that are already emerging are:
Between expectations and realities around universal rescue and relief, undermining traditional reputational trust – remember what the 2022 Northern NSW Flood Inquiry had to say about the SES? Communication resourcing needs to be taken seriously at last with more than just mass communication efforts using the usual channels. People who deeply understand their local communities will become a superpower for agencies. Strong, resourced, local level engagement and networks should become part of BAU.
Growing need to involve communities in co-designing risk mitigation and response planning, shifting from top-down messaging to truly collaborative models to manage expectations and local responsibilities. This will present challenges for agencies and staff who invest in the concept of shared responsibility only in the preparedness phase of disaster management. This selective trust around shared responsibility is also clearly a problem in national doctrine.
Potential for social unrest or disengagement where communities feel abandoned or priorities are at odds with agency triage decisions, creating risks to staff and volunteers. An example of this was the outcomes of disinformation around Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in the US.
Strategic Foresight to deal with what’s coming
To really deal with all of these challenges, agencies need to beef up the usual strategic planning process with foresight and design thinking as part of BAU. They need to:
Invest in foresight capabilities, systems mapping, and design thinking to anticipate emergent volunteer models and shift societal expectations. Inclusion of comms and engagement teams, plus out-of-the-box thinkers from around the organisation, will drive success in this process.
Leverage cross-sector partnerships (business, schools, technology firms) to supplement and sustain crisis capability. A great example is the Victorian Country Fire Authority’s ‘Schools in Fire Country’ program.
Monitor and quickly and innovatively address insurance, legal, and reputational gaps emerging from unorthodox volunteer engagements and expanded risk profiles.
How do we get there?
Emergency management needs to move away from the military-style process thinking that dominates emergency management. Creativity and innovation will go a long way to helping agencies adapt to the challenges outlined in the report.
The sector also needs to understand that strategy isn’t foresight and foresight isn’t strategy. Foresight is not just understanding what’s coming, but knowing the organisation’s unique abilities, processes and activities that will allow it to take what’s coming over the horizon in its stride.
And when it comes down to it, emergency management is all about people – staff, volunteers, and their local communities - and dealing with people is hard.
It needs people within agencies who are big thinkers, flexible and can bring others with them. It also needs tight integration with communities, active co-planning and networking, and a more genuine and two-way trust between communities, the individuals who stick up their hands when the chips are down, and agencies.
Hard work – but definitely possible.
Sources
· Australian Climate Service (2025), ‘Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment’, ACS, Canberra.
· Forner, V. (2023), ‘Building resilience to climate change: the role of volunteers’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 38(4), pp. 21-26.
· McLennan, B., Whittaker, J. & Handmer, J. (2016), ‘The changing landscape of disaster volunteering: opportunities, responses and gaps in Australia’. Natural Hazards, 84 (3), 2031-2048.
· Van der Laan, L. (2021). ‘Disentangling Strategic Foresight? A critical analysis of the term building on the work of pioneering Richard Slaughter’. Futures, (132).
· Van der Laan, L. (2020). ‘Back to Futures: Futures studies and its role in addressing the great civilisational challenges’. Human Futures.
· Volunteering Australia (2022), ‘Volunteering and Australia’s crisis resilience’. Viewed 19 Sept 2025.
Dr Barbara Ryan consults in emergency agency foresight and community engagement. She is based on Queensland, Australia. This article was written with the assistance of Perplexity AI.
