In Queensland, collaboration between Dutch and Australian water and flood resilience professionals has been ongoing since 2013 – when the Flood Community of Practice first came into being.  In 2016 there was heightened activity and in this photo Dutch and Australian colleagues worked on sharing experiences at a Resilient Urban Deltas and Floodplains Summit.

This year we would like to rekindle this relationship and to start this peer to peer approach with this 90 minute online discussion for any interested  “Flood Resilience” professional from Australia or the Netherlands. You are all welcome!   Please register here at this link. 

                             The first topic for this informal discussion is:

“How does a Dutch or Australian community know it is safe to live on a floodplain?”

Who are we expecting?

You are starting or may have already done one of the many preemptive tasks – jobs – effort to support a community to know it is safe to live on a floodplain, like:

• Build and run the flood model scenarios for the catchment and community of interest
• Assess the hazard of flood impacts and what that means in terms of risk to people, assets and the environment
• Build and coordinate the responsible agencies for flood risk reduction planning
• Design and initiate the community awareness, engagement and activation program
• Ensure that the disaster management arrangement for a community are in place
• Find the champions – both at an institutional and community level – to help talk about flood risk
• Work with media to build the awareness using evidence based stories

Leading the discussion the invited guests at this stage are:

• Mike Foster from Brisbane who has a wealth of SEQ experiences in flood and drought responses and what this can mean for a community;
• Nanco Dolman a Dutch urban water resilience professional who will share what a community in the City of Zwolle has done to be climate change ready

Stay tuned as we seek additional community engagement/communication and behavior change colleagues to join the discussion.

Plus, we do seek your engagement by taking time for your queries, your responses to questions and by joining small breakout groups.  There is a wealth of experience and knowledge that can be shared on this topic.

We look forward to you joining us and sharing some joint Dutch-Australian connections.