South East Queensland shone at the recently held national Natural Resource Management (NRM) conference which was held in Margaret River in Western Australia this week.

This year's theme for the conference was 'Resilience through Transformation' which is a topic very close to Healthy Land & Water's heart. 

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Resilience through Transformation’, which is a topic very close to Healthy Land & Water’s heart.

Our ‘Roadmap to Resilience’ campaign was the topic of great interest across our sister NRM groups, all of which are grappling with similar issues. They were interested in how Healthy Land & Water is planning out a strategy over the coming year to tackle the issue head-on, starting with raising awareness of the need to work together toward developing a resilience solution to flip the current reactionary funding model.

The conference was a great chance to discuss ways NRM groups can contribute to and influence local governments to incorporate a proactive funding model aimed at building resilience to natural disasters and climate change.

During the course of the event, experts from Healthy Land & Water headlined five well-received talks. It was great to see South East Queensland so strongly represented in the line-up. Our presentation spanned a variety of timely and important topics, including:

• Activating a roadmap to resilience campaign: switching from supporting to leading (presented by Julie McLellan).
• Progress on the realisation of First Nations rights to care for Country in South East Queensland (presented by Maddie George).
• NRM leadership in landscape-scale fire management planning – Queensland leading the charge (presented by Joel Bolzenius).
• Protecting cultural heritage values from wildfire on Bribie Island (presented by Paul Donatiu).
• Rainforest resilience after the 2019 bushfire season (presented by Paul Donatiu).

This event was hosted by NRM Regions Australia, the peak group of the 56 NRM organisations that cover every inch of Australia. Since 2008 NRM Regions Australia has held biennial Knowledge Conferences to facilitate knowledge sharing and build national networks of organisations and practitioners.

With such diverse landscapes and land types in Australia, it’s great to see many sharp minds collectively come together to solve local problems.