Australia's risk management approaches must adapt to meet the multifaceted challenges of hazard, exposure and vulnerability.35 Doing this successfully requires a systems approach that emphasises collaboration, shared responsibility and accountability.
Systemic thinking shifts the focus from the resilience of a physical infrastructure asset to the contribution that asset makes to the resilience of the broader network, provision of critical services, supply chains and cross- sectoral systems. It allows interdependencies and vulnerabilities to be considered holistically, within the context of increasing shocks and stresses. This will strengthen the resilience of the asset, network, sector, place, precinct, city and region.
Taking a systemic approach not only changes the emphasis from asset to system, it moves responsibility from individual to shared responsibility. For example, protecting an asset or network requires collaboration across sectors, communities and local governments so disaster risk management is integrated into asset design and disaster risk management plans.
The steps towards transformational systemic change are described in the Infrastructure Australia and Infrastructure NSW paper A Pathway to Infrastructure Resilience: Opportunities for systemic change.36 The pathway described would:
• Set and monitor strategic resilience outcomes: Governance that adopts a systemic view of risk and establishes the accountability and resources necessary to achieve system-wide resilience.
• Adopt place-based approaches: Planning tools and data to consider multiple place-based issues simultaneously and address resilience and community needs.
• Manage uncertainty through scenario planning: A common set of future scenarios to streamline planning and support cross-sector coordination and shared responsibility.
• Ensure land use planning and development decisions support resilience: Planning systems that value and set resilience as policy objectives, incorporate new and emerging data, capture local opportunities and assess strengths and weaknesses.
• Improve infrastructure investment decision-making: Agreed mechanisms and guidance for quantifying the projected economic, social, environmental and governance implications of the impacts associated with managing uncertainty or resilience.
• Value green and blue infrastructure and biodiversity: Improving the understanding, valuation and governance of green and blue infrastructure. Encouraging the use of green and blue infrastructure to address service needs, such as drainage, stormwater and erosion mitigation, as well as complementary quadruple-bottom-line benefits, such as space, habitat and recreational infrastructure.
• Improve data needed for informed planning, action and decision-making: Coordinating, sharing and standardising critical disaster and climate data, including data and information on shocks and stresses, the exposure of people and assets and the vulnerability of people.
• Collect and share information on asset and network vulnerability: Creating a shared understanding of potential impacts to interconnected systems and increasing asset and network owners' understanding of their decisions on interconnected systems.
• Build trust through more inclusive decision-making: Including communities and informing them about the risk, uncertainty and trade-offs related to infrastructure services and their livelihoods, and allowing people's active participation in determining possible outcomes.
• Embed traditional ecological knowledge in decision-making: Opportunities to systematically draw on traditional ecological knowledge to manage land and natural resources, and mitigate-risk.37
" Australia's risk management approaches must adapt to meet the multifaceted challenges of hazard exposure and vulnerability. "
The recommendations in this chapter are just a starting point for embedding a systemic approach to managing risk. There will also need to be ongoing, broader changes aligned with the identified opportunities.