QFF’s Industry Resilience and Recovery Officers (IRROs) recently hosted their end of year forum, A Flood of Findings, in Toowoomba alongside project delivery partners Burnett Mary Regional Group (BMRG).
The event was a culmination of 18 months of work delivering the IRRO Program to primary producers across 23 local government areas in Queensland that were impacted by the 2021-2022 flooding events in southern, central, southeast and western Queensland.
Through the program, 100 primary producers were supported by QFF, and 97 primary producers by BMRG, to develop Flood Management Plans to build flood recovery capacity, resilience and identify strategies to mitigate farm business risk.
A Flood of Findings provided a platform for the learnings from the IRRO program to be presented as well for industry technical advisers to present on a range of recovery and resilience topics.
In addition to the good planning work QFF’s disaster recovery and resilience team have helped deliver on farm and in regional communities, QFF continues to call for better policy settings to ensure farm businesses return to business-as-usual activities in a timely manner after a disaster event, minimising their downtime and restoring production as soon as possible.
This would include a ‘spine of resources’ to support primary producers throughout the lifecycle of natural disasters to ensure resources are embedded in industry and local communities to be able to effectively assist in recovery and pivot to a resilience building role when the community is ready.
The Industry Recovery and Resilience Officer Program has been jointly funded by the Australian and Queensland governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.