Collaboration was key to building Regional Drought Resilience Plans

The first part of the Regional Drought Resilience Planning (RDRP) program was building plans – Regional Drought Resilience Plans. The Plans articulate the themes and actions of each region to build social, economic and environmental resilience to drought.

Plans were built by each region for that region, to ensure they represented local priorities, experiences and perspectives. Agriculture Victoria, through our excellent Regional Leaders, facilitated a collaborative approach through Regional Reference Groups.

Reference Group members were drawn from the agriculture, water, community, natural resource, health and finance sectors as well as from local and state government and Traditional Owner corporations.

Plans were developed in 4 stages in collaboration with Reference Group members:

Discovery: worked with Frontier Economics to answer questions such as:

what are the regions’ experiences and understandings of recent droughts, and preparedness and response efforts?
how did communities respond and how could they have been better prepared?
and what is likely to happen in the future and what might that look like?

Engagement: identified and engaged with local stakeholders to understand different experiences, perspectives and potential solutions. All these insights were brought together to build the Plan.

Development: draft Plans were prepared with particular attention to the themes and actions identified for each region.

Endorsement: final reports were finalised following feedback by CSIRO as part of the program agreement under the FDF. Agriculture Victoria then presented the endorsed Plans to the Victorian and Australian Agriculture Ministers for approval and publication.

Many of the individuals and organisations that came together to develop the Plans are now helping to implement them through an Implementation Grants program. Visit the page of each region to find the Plan, and see what activities are underway to build regional drought resilience.