Last Thursday evening at the Southern Cross University, a small group of people gathered for the fourth Disaster Adaptation Plan (DAP) public workshop in the Northern Rivers. The three previous public workshops were held in Murwillumbah, Mullumbimby and Grafton.

Entitled 'What Matters Most', the workshops were run by the Living Lab in conjunction with the NSW Reconstruction Authority (RA). The purpose was to find out what people value most about where they live, what they want to protect, what concerns them and what priorities should guide our region’s future.

The public workshops were one part of a number of steps the RA will take before delivering a draft DAP early in 2026 for the community to give feedback on.

Emma Whale is the Executive Director Adaptation, Mitigation and Data Insights for the RA. Emma was in Lismore last week and sat down to explain the DAP process.

"What we're really hoping to do is get a sense from the community what they value in place in terms of natural hazard risk, and then also in terms of a disaster happening. And it's been really interesting. I went to the Mullumbimby one last week and participated in the exercise. It was really interesting to see, because in the exercise, you're ranking different kinds of things like medical services or public transport or public art or whatever it might be, into what matters least through to what matters most.

"It's really hard to make those distinctions, because everything feels really important, but it's a way of getting some cut through to understand what are the things that people are deeply connected to in their place, and then how can we take that information and put it into the DAP process?

"One of the things that came through really strongly in the workshop that I was in last week, and I think has been reflected in other workshops as well, is that people are very connected to the aesthetic beauty of the Northern Rivers. I mean, this is why they live here, because it's a beautiful place to live, and so they're willing to accept trade-offs. Maybe there's not as much public transport. I did hear people complaining about that, but it's a trade-off that they're willing to accept because they love living here. So that's really important for us to understand.

"If we're looking at options for risk reduction, we want to know and find ways of embedding the fact that people really care about their environment, and they're potentially not willing, to accept interventions that are going to be really harmful. So that's the kind of thing that we can glean from the process, and then kind of put that into a decision support framework to help us understand what kinds of options are going to be on the table in the DAP process."

Is mitigation part of the DAP process, or is it run in parallel or separately?

"What we're doing is looking at all the options that you have on the table for mitigation and adaptation. What we always say about the DAPs is that we mitigate where we can, but you can't mitigate all risk. We live next to rivers, we live near the coastline, we live in bushfire-prone areas, and so there are always going to be natural hazard risk where we live. We want to mitigate that to the extent that we can, but where we can't mitigate, then we have to find ways of helping our communities adapt. So that's really what the DAPs will do.

"Where can we mitigate? Where could we build a levee? Where could we have a wetland? Where could we have a sea wall or sand nourishment, or lots of different things? Where can we have improved evacuation infrastructure? But, where we can't do those things, how do we have better flood evacuation signage? How do we have better community awareness and preparedness programs, or better social cohesion that helps people connect and be prepared to recover in the event of a disaster. All options are on the table.

"And then, it's a matter of working with stakeholders, including local government, other state government agencies, the community, etc, to have the conversations around what do we value? What do we want to see? What do we think will work to mitigate in the context of the Northern Rivers? And then, how do we help communities adapt when we've reached, I guess, the limit of what we can mitigate?"

How does the CSIRO modelling, the two scenarios that include detention basins, fit into the DAP?

"What we will do is take what comes out of that process and put it through our own process, which is separate to what we're doing. It's looking primarily at the reduction of floodwater during major flooding. You want to balance up the benefit of the risk reduction against the other things that might be associated with it, and that might include environmental impact, the complexity of implementation, impacts to Aboriginal cultural heritage. And it's this balancing act to say, well, at what point do we say these kind of complexities or costs or risks outweigh the benefit of what it might bring. And that's what the DAP process does.

"A good practical example of this is from the Hawkesbury Nepean Valley, and one of the values that came through with the workshops we held with the community was that they weren't prepared to accept an intervention that benefited one community but caused a disbenefit to another community. For example, if we built a levee to protect one community and it had a disbenefit to a community downstream, they weren't prepared to accept that.

"So, that was a really important, I guess, value that we could then put in our decision support framework, so that any intervention that did have that disbenefit to another community was just taken off the table. It's kind of like a filtering approach, where we're balancing the risk reduction benefit alongside what are those other considerations that are really important.

How does the Living Lab and the RA achieve a broad range of community feedback during these sessions? It could well be hijacked by a particular group of people.

"I think that's important to note that the values workshops are an important input, but they're just one input, right? So, alongside that, we'll have the community reference group that we're setting, which is that representative sample that we've got from across the Northern Rivers, and we're looking to have the first meeting in November. But we're also going to complement that with quite a bit of intensive consultation around April, May next year, when we've got some risk information to share, some early options that have come out of the process.

"We are trying to reach as many people as possible through lots of different avenues. So, the way we're looking at it is that it's almost like a jigsaw puzzle. When we're building out the regional risk profile, there's lots of different elements that we want that give us that really comprehensive picture.

"I guess what we're trying to do is make sure that community is involved and at the centre of the decisions that we're making, because there are trade-offs. There's always going to be trade-offs about cost or complexity or risk, and it's like those conversations can be hard to have and difficult to have, but they're necessary to have, and we don't want to just have them without community in the conversation is really the whole point of the DAP process.

To get that complete community picture, Emma's advice is for everyone to be involved.

"The more voices we have, the richer the process will be. There'll also be an opportunity, once we have the draft foundation DAP, which we're looking to have about Q3 next year, we will then consult on that as well. So we're trying to have all these points in the process where we're testing and validating the information that we're receiving, and also feed that back to the community, saying Does this reflect your lived experience, what you know of the Northern Rivers? And, did we get it right? We genuinely want to know that. So, there'll be lots of points in the process where people can have input."

As well as the four public workshops recently, private workshops have been completed with rough sleepers/homeless people, seniors, young people at high schools and community resilience organisations.

The data will be collated and formed into a Draft Disaster Adaptation Plan document that will be released to the residents of the Northern Rivers in early 2026, for you to give your thoughts on before a final Northern Rivers DAP document is released later in 2026. In combination with the CSIRO Richmond River Flood Modelling findings, a decision will be made as to the best way forward for the future safety and security of residents living in Lismore and the Northern Rivers.