Our program is focused on shifting the country to prepare and be more resilient to fires and floods, to reduce the harm these natural threats cause. Every disaster is an opportunity to build back stronger in our most vulnerable communities.

In March 2022, when devastating floods swept through New South Wales and Queensland, Minderoo Foundation was on the ground assisting communities hand in hand with our partners.

With the Salvation Army, we shipped in essential supplies, front line support workers, and food for 27,189 households. With Lifeline we provided psychological support for 20,000 people and recruited other support workers for key locations. With Orange Sky, we did 10,197 loads of washing, generated 6,750 hours of conversation and worked 750 volunteer shifts. Our 25 pods were the first temporary accommodation in the Northern Rivers (redeployed from Black Summer locations).

Our three missions each set out to challenge the impossible, and drive national and global generational change.

By 2025, Fire Shield aims to detect and extinguish dangerous fires in an hour. We’ll drive generational change by detecting fires in near real time from space, and by using artificial intelligence to predict what fires will do next.

Resilient Communities aims to lift the 50 most vulnerable communities alongside the most resilient. We’ll drive generational change by knowing the most at risk communities nationally at any moment, helping them develop locally led resilience plans and building the country’s largest resilience focused volunteer army — The Australian Resilience Corps — to help with community projects.

Healthy Landscapes aims to halve the hazard exposure of fire or flood in our most at risk landscapes. We’ll drive generational change by catalysing standards and measurement to make nature an investable asset class.

Big ideas that will deliver impact within each mission include: detecting fires from space, using risk data to inform grants and help communities to plan and prepare before disasters strike, accurately measuring and valuing natural capital to incentivise resilience-based investment in our landscapes, and growing Australia’s largest resilience focused volunteer army together with partners.

Our Resilience Index is a vital data-set that delivers a common operating picture of natural threat risks for the country. The index helps to prioritise investment decisions for our work, our partners and for government agencies investing in disaster resilience.

Our Resilient Communities Framework, developed with global partners, helps communities assess fire and flood resilience and develop a locally led resilience plan.

The Australian Resilience Corps, launched in November 2021, is growing a national network of disaster resilience volunteers, NGOs, communities, and corporates — all determined to reduce the devastation caused by fire and flood before they occur.

The partner documentary, A Fire Inside, screened nationally in cinemas, on TV and via streaming platforms and called on audiences to help their fellow Aussies by joining ‘The Corps’. Corps volunteers get access to online resilience training from experts and learn how to protect their property, manage their mental health and compose a successful resilience plan ahead of helping on the ground in communities.

The first community planning and preparedness ‘muster’ was held in Wooroloo, WA in June 2022. Corps volunteers cleared combustible weeds and dried vegetation to reduce future fires. In the Burnett Mary region of QLD, Accounting For Nature, Pollination and NAB established a 5.5 million hectare test bed: Australia’s first certified environmental account of this scale. It will put a value on natural assets like rivers, forests and farm land to inform fire and flood risk and management in future.

In the next 12 months, we will focus on growing our projects nationally with and through partners to reach vulnerable regional communities to help them plan and adapt to Australia’s extreme weather events. We will also identify global opportunities such as space-based technologies to detect fires faster and with greater accuracy and take the work proven in the Burnett Mary region and scale it across other regions. We will also continue to apply pressure to governments to move from an investment focus on response and recovery, to increased investment in resilience.

This will be made possible by Minderoo Foundation continuing to deliver impact via our more than 80 partners across government, corporate, philanthropic, research, and community stakeholders.