Cascading Climate Risks From Critical Infrastructure Failure Project Report

So our critical infrastructure, energy, telecommunications, water, wastewater and transport are crucial for everything we do. We all know the challenges we face when we lose services. Power outages, no internet, disrupted water supply and road closures. While we've all managed these kind of outages in our personal lives, how would we cope with disruptions that last days or weeks at a time? How do we cope when these outages affect multiple services? Council services are no different to our homes in being dependent on power, telecoms, water and transport, except that we have more than our families depending on these services. If Council is without power and water for a week or longer, how would we function? How would we keep staff safe if buildings can't be heated or cooled, water isn't available and can't call or email each other. How can we make good decisions if we don't have access to information when the internet goes down and computers can't be powered. The cascading climate risk from critical infrastructure failure project or the CIF project for short was a two-year project. With 1.1 million dollars in grant funding from the QRA through the Queensland risk and resilience fund the project addresses a key action in our regional climate action Roadmap with the Sunshine Coast Council working with partners across the region including Energex, Unitywater, Telstra, NBN Co, Queensland Fire Department, of health, Queensland Police Service and many more. The project carefully examines the potential impacts on Council services arising from outages in critical infrastructure. Highlighted this work that climate change increases the likelihood of cascading and compounding types of hazards which in turn increases the likelihood of disruption to critical infrastructure services. Crucially the project that disruptions to critical infrastructure can cascade across sectors and these disruptions may last longer than we have experienced before. This could mean a week or more without critical infrastructure services. The project identified numerous risks to Council. Broadly, these include reduced productivity, communication failures, disruption to disaster response activities, physical impacts to staff from unsafe and unclean workplaces. For example, if we don't have running water or can't keep the offices impacts to revenue streams if payments can't be processed. Reduced quality of organisational decision making, accountability, transparency and ultimately reputational damage. We bring this report to Council to share the important findings of the CIV project, but also to demonstrate that the project has identified practical options to reduce the risks. A range of technological and non-technological measures, all of which are available now, were highlighted. In addition, the project developed a high-level business case that demonstrated the value of technological measures two our key sites, the Noosaville Depot, which includes the Local Disaster Coordination Centre, and the second case was the Leisure Centre, which is also our evacuation centre. These are great foundations, but we'll need to be proactive in responding to the findings across the organisation. This report seeks support for continuing to leverage the ongoing partnership with Sunshine Coast Council and Stakeholder Reference Group members and the representatives from many critical infrastructure service providers to implement adaptation measures across the organisation, including priority actions to implement measures to enhance the resilience of the depot and the LDCC. Establish non-technical management solutions and related to this establish the required organisational governance to drive holistic climate adaptation response. There's much work to be done the CIF project puts us in a position of having a much better understanding of the risks and importantly the adaptation measures that can address these risks. I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank and acknowledge our partners in the project the Sunshine Coast Council of the Stakeholder Reference Group who have been instrumental in completing this project.

Amelia Lorentson91:50

Thank you, Kim. Anyone else would like to speak to the report? No, no further discussion. All in favour? That's unanimous. And that brings us, I think, to the you very speak report? End. Thank much. Thank you, David. That brings us to the last item, so reports for noting by the committee. 8.1, cascading climate risk from critical infrastructure failure project report. And welcome to the desk, if you want to pass over to Jo. Thank you. Sorry, so Jo. You go ahead.

Did you look at that and is there anything that has come out of it from that perspective? It did, but to a lesser extent, unfortunately. We found that in the workshops, had over 50 engagements, workshops, briefings, presentations throughout the project, and we found that through the workshops it was, it became quite difficult to have multiple scenarios of critical infrastructure failure and impacts to Council services that both address the acute hazards in near-term climate, like 2030, 2028, as well as the long-term 2050 scenarios that the chronic that you've touched on. So we did look at it, and there are some interesting insights and findings, but not to the extent and not to the urgency of the acute hazards that we have quite a lot to do already on. So, yeah, plenty to keep you busy. There's plenty to keep us busy, yes.

We were invited by the QRA, the Queensland Reconstruction Authority, to present this project to their critical infrastructure resilience working group that they have with multiple state agencies including the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. And it was, again, very well received. Very highly commended as probably the first instance of local government looking at cascading and compounding climate risks in Queensland, potentially in Australia. And so the findings will be advanced through further conversations, and we've been asked to do multiple presentations to a few of the agencies in particular as follow up as well, as taking the findings to conferences. Some of the findings, as you guys will note, are confidential because the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, particularly the details on critical regional infrastructure just because of national security. So we can't release all the findings, but certainly the risks, the Council services and the responses are things that we can work on.