Townsville and Palm Island Regional Resilience Strategy

Project background

By 2022, every region across Queensland will be part of a locally-led and regionally coordinated blueprint to strengthen disaster resilience. Regional resilience strategies and local resilience action plans will help to keep Queenslanders safe by providing a coordinated approach to identify and prioritise disaster resilience actions.

Multi-hazard approach

The Palm Island and Townsville Regional Resilience Strategy uses a locally-led, regionally coordinated and state facilitated approach with multi-sector stakeholder participation to address the following hazards:

• cyclone (severe storm and wind)
• bushfire
• flood
• heatwave
• pandemic and other hazards
• earthquake.

The Strategy is drawn from on-country engagement with Councils and community members, and focus on the key regional resilience priorities of:

• critical infrastructure – its importance and flow on effects if not functioning;
• disruption, isolation – climate and man made
• cultural connection– informed by traditional knowledge, connection to family, landscape and across communities;
• leadership – enabling change and trade-offs; and
• biosecurity and food security - threats to what we value and our quality of life.

Steering committee

The Project Steering Committee for the Palm Island and Townsville Regional Resilience Strategy is comprised of the council project partners.

Region

The geographic extent of the Palm Island and Townsville Regional Resilience Strategy is the combined area of the two local governments.

Council partners

The Palm Island and Townsville Regional Resilience Strategy is a partnership with the following councils:

• Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council
• Townsville City Council.

Resilience Action Plans

QRA has worked with the councils of the Palm Island and Townsville region to develop and deliver Local Resilience Action Plans that will help keep communities safe by providing a coordinated approach to identifying and prioritising disaster resilience actions, and embedding resilience and risk reduction into decision making and investment.

Every council in Queensland will receive Resilience Action Plan - a clear forward plan for how we can make lasting change into the future through sustained investment in resilience and mitigation activities.

These Resilience Action Plans aim to support councils to be as proactive as possible to describe their local resilience needs, and to build a forward program of effort that can be matched to funding opportunities over time as they emerge. The benefit of this is that local communities needs will be well known at all levels of government, and we can progressively deliver on these needs over time.

Photos