News

In February 2023, CREW attended the two-day Flood Risk Management Conference hosted by Sniffer in Perth. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Water Resilient Places’ both from a policy and on the ground actions perspective. The hybrid conference included attendees from local and national government, research and higher education institutes, as well as relevant experts from consultancies.

The first morning’s plenary sessions ended with a panel discussion that highlighted current challenges in flood risk management. The challenges included recognising the need to listen to the community already experiencing risk and likely to experience more in the face of climate change, where is the funding for innovation in flood risk management coming from, and finally how to support healthy natural systems that can adapt to and help to mitigate these risks.

The second day’s plenary sessions focussed on flood warning, funding and finance considerations, and benefits that citizen science can bring. Case studies of local organisations working together with communities to find solutions highlighted the need to understand the challenges each faced and the need for a holistic plan-led approach.

The final panel discussion about ‘where to next?’ focussed on how we can break siloes of individual organisation data management and knowledge exchange strategies and build towards a catchment-based approach to flood risk management. This discussion strongly resonates with CREW’s vision to support a collaborative approach to knowledge exchange between government and research organisations.