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The fires tearing through Europe after this year’s heatwaves make one thing clear. Disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. Almost half of NSW is in drought right now, and the Bureau of Meteorology has declared an El Niño event. Put those together and there’s a strong chance we’re heading into a serious bushfire season. So, it’s worth asking: Are we more prepared than we were before the 2019–20 fires?
At the community level, there’s been real progress and outstanding work. I’ve seen it firsthand working with incredible, passionate people on projects like Community Organisations Disaster Adaptation (CODA) Project.
But what communities learn isn’t enough without resources to embed and sustain them statewide. In NSW, that knowledge keeps evaporating because long-term funding for disaster preparedness doesn’t exist. Projects like CODA are funded, staffed, and delivered. Then the funding ends, the positions close, and people carry what they’ve learned into their next job. We keep starting from scratch.
This needs to change.
It’s a strange, almost backwards arrangement: we need a disaster before there’s the political will to fund preparing for one.
Earlier this year, the Commonwealth’s Disaster Ready Fund Round 4 was the only funding on the table for community organisations wanting to do preparedness work. But it wasn’t built for them. It’s a fund designed for large infrastructure and physical mitigation projects, and community organisations trying to fit community preparedness work into that mould ran into two big barriers.
The first was the co-contribution: applicants were required to provide a minimum 20 per cent of project value. The logic behind this is that a co-contribution gives the applicant “skin in the game.” But community organisations already have skin in the game – they’re there before a disaster, during it, and for years after emergency services have stood down. The problem isn’t commitment. It’s cash flow. They’re funded to deliver services, almost none of them carry capital they can redirect into their own projects. A 20 per cent co-contribution screens many applicants out before the work even starts.
The second was the application process itself: long, resource-intensive, on a short timeframe. That’s extremely difficult to undertake for organisations already stretched thin. For many of the organisations I spoke with, that alone made the decision for them. Good ideas for keeping communities safer never made it to the table. Not for lack of merit, but for lack of capacity to get through the application process.
Despite its flaws, the Commonwealth’s Disaster Ready Fund made one thing clear: when funding exists, community organisations can turn it into real, on-the-ground change. What’s needed now is for that funding to be more accessible and sustained, and that comes down to political will.
The NSW Reconstruction Authority is doing commendable work on a State Disaster Mitigation Plan and Disaster Adaptation Plans. What’s missing is a funding pathway that flows from those plans to the community sector delivering the work on the ground.
The Commonwealth’s Disaster Ready Fund shouldn’t be the only mechanism for disaster preparedness funding. Building genuine ways of working with the community sector, and investing in its capacity to do this work, is one of the most direct ways the NSW Reconstruction Authority can act on its own mandate for disaster preparedness.
The Joint Select Committee’s own review of the operations of the NSW Reconstruction Authority regarding the NSW East Coast severe weather from May 2025 made the same point. Recommendation 6 calls for the Authority to establish further formal partnership agreements and memorandums of understanding with local community organisations, so their role in disaster preparedness and recovery is formally recognised and properly resourced. Recommendation 15 goes further: it calls for the Authority to invest in preparedness initiatives that strengthen community capacity and capability through a dedicated fund, co-designed with insurers, local councils and community organisations.
The longer NSW goes without a catastrophic disaster, the further preparedness funding slips down the priority list. Yet now is exactly the moment to act, while there’s still time to be proactive rather than reactive. We shouldn’t need another Summer of Crisis to have this conversation again.
Here is the NCOSS ask: before DRF Round 5 or the next NSW Budget, NSW needs a dedicated, ongoing preparedness fund for the community sector. This would change preparedness from another short-term project into continuity: the ability to keep people, relationships and practice in place long enough for them to matter.
The next catastrophic disaster in NSW isn’t a question of if. It’s a question of when. It’s time we started funding preparedness like we believe that.