Drought Resilience program
Healthy Land & Water’s Drought Resilience program is helping South East Queensland landholders to proactively prepare for drought and changes in climate.
Building landholder's capacity to successfully manage drought and its consequences
The program is building the capacity of landholders so they can successfully manage drought and its consequences, building farm and community resilience, and improving planning and decision-making.
By extension this will help bolster their capacity to continue to be successful business operators, contribute to strong rural communities, maintain a competitive advantage in the global market, and result in a more sustainable environment.
This project is focused on:
- Ensuring landholders prepare for rather than respond to drought.
- Improving soil health, water use efficiency, and pasture and land condition.
- Helping landholders adopt more sustainable land management practices.
- Building on existing relationships between Healthy Land and Water, peak farming groups, State agencies, producers, and consultants.
Helping landholders with strategies to continue being successful business & enterprise operators, landscape managers, and risk managers and contribute to a strong and robust community that is built on resilience and local champions.
What we are doing
Sharing the latest planning practices and technologies with landholders t build resilience, maximise efficiency, and build environmental and economic buffers.
The program focused on landholders' capacity building involves:
- Supporting a series of landholder trials and demonstration sites showcasing a variety of strategies and practices that improve natural resource conditions and resilience to encourage wider uptake across the landscape.
- Measuring baseline conditions, trends, and improvements in natural capital, particularly soils and land conditions, using established indicators and tools to monitor and promote longer-term benefits associated with improved management practices.
- Improving landholder awareness, understanding of benchmarking, and natural capital accounting as a way of measuring and verifying improvements for meeting sustainability goals and considering emerging environmental markets.
- Sharing and promoting learnings and benefits through landholder and community networks, workshops and field days, a regional forum, and a series of case studies/fact sheets to increase further trialling and adoption of drought-resilient practices by other landholders across the region.
- Sharing the latest on planning, practices, and technologies with landholders to build resilience, maximise efficiency and build environmental and economic buffers.
The regionally focused program builds on existing relationships between Healthy Land & Water and peak farming groups, State agencies, producers, and consultants including Growcom, Queensland Dairy Farmers Organisation, Subtropical Dairy, Agforce, and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Measuring success
- The planned program of coordinated demonstration, monitoring activities, and shared learnings will directly help build drought resilience within the grazing landscapes of SEQ.
- Landholders will have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to develop and implement effective adaptation and management plans, strategies, and practices that enable them to better prepare for, manage, and recover from drought and severe climate events.
- The number of landholders trialling and adopting drought-resilient management practices will increase thanks to the direct involvement in trials and demonstration sites and effective promotion through field days, forums, and case studies.
- This program will also boost local and regional landholder networks and collaboration with community and industry organisations to share learnings to promote increased adoption and scaling up across the wider landscape during and beyond this project.
- As a result, natural capital at both property and landscape levels, particularly soil health, pasture and grazing land condition, and riparian health will improve.
Why this project is important
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Australia is the driest inhabited continent. Landholders are used to dealing with a highly variable climate, however, faced with the worsening effects of climate change, South East Queensland land managers need to better prepare for drought, floods, and intense weather events. Drought affects the productivity, profitability, and well-being of the communities that rely on the rural sector, as well as significantly impacting the environment. As a consequence, land management practices can be neglected due to the financial and environmental conditions and constraints and can lead to a reduction in financial and social capital in regional communities. This project is important because it will support a variety of on-farm trials that demonstrate and promote grazing and land management practices that improve soil health, grazing land condition, and riparian areas, for wider application and adoption by other landholders across the region. The rigorous assessment and monitoring of natural capital/resource condition- soils, pasture and land, riparian & native vegetation – will help provide further evidence of the longer-term production and environmental benefits of recommended practices and improve landholder understanding of monitoring tools and verification frameworks they can consider implementing on their properties. The project aims to encourage the sharing of landholder experiences, peer-to-peer learning, and information on best practices and new tools within existing industry networks and extend the learnings to other landholders through a program of local workshops and field days, a regional forum, case studies, and newsletters, to promote wider adoption and implementation of management strategies and practices which improve the resilience of natural resources to ensure a greater number of farming businesses across the region can adapt and manage drought and climate risks. |
Project snapshot
| Project names: |
Project 1 (2021 - 2022) Drought Resilience Program - Farming Project 2 (2022 - 2024) Drought Resilience Program - Soils & Landscapes |
| Project manager: | Bruce Lord, Healthy Land & Water |
| Project team: | Vanessa Smolders, Renee Ould, Marc Leman |
| Catchment: | South East Queensland |
| Timing: | 2021 – Ongoing |
| Budget: | $286,582 |
| Partnerships: | This project is funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and builds on existing relationships between Healthy Land & Water and peak farming groups, State agencies, producers and consultants including Growcom, Queensland Dairy farmers Organisation, Subtropical Dairy, Agforce and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. |
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What's next
There is huge potential to build on the successful work.
Project collaborators
This project is funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and builds on existing relationships between Healthy Land & Water and peak farming groups, State agencies, producers , and consultants including Growcom, Queensland Dairy Farmers Organisation, Subtropical Dairy, Agforce, and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
This drought resilience program is made possible thanks to funding from the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund.
