In December 2019, lightning strikes during the scorching Summer started wildfires which affected an area of around 200,000 hectares on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, in what has become known as the Black Summer.  The bushfires significantly impacted the landscape, wildlife and the community, bringing attention to the importance of placing effort and action on natural hazard and risk considerations for the Island to avoid and/or mitigate future social, physical, economic and environmental impacts of such events.

Kangaroo Island Council engaged Meridan Urban and Water Technology to help them develop a whole of island Natural Disaster Risk Mitigation Action Plan.  This involved co-designing the approach with Council to focus on the following activities:

• Collation of existing actions contained in strategic and operational documents across different hazards
• Categorisation and synthesis of the actions
• Undertaking community consultation sessions to obtain feedback, input and priorities of the local community
• Priortisation of the actions

The outcomes of the project included a prioritised and fully costed whole-of-Island Action Plan aligned to the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework that provides Council and its partner agencies with a unified and coordinated plan that better helps to prepare the local community for disasters.  This action plan provides Council and its community with a single source of truth by which to make future decisions and investment.  The Action Plan will inform Council’s Annual Business Planning process, Capital Works expenditure, grant funding opportunities and public-private partnerships for future investment in natural disaster risk reduction.

The project won the Planning Institute of Australia’s – SA Branch – 2024 Award for Planning Excellence in the Climate Change and Resilience Category.