All seven local government areas of the Northern Rivers are flood-affected. At the centre of the region, Lismore, surrounded by five of these councils, is recognised as the most at risk community in the nation for floods.
Following the devastating 2017 flood, the Lismore Citizens Flood Review Group formed to investigate, determine lack of progress and identify long-term solutions to the City's flood issue. What began as a local effort quickly grew into a broader examination of systemic failures in emergency management and flood mitigation policy.
By 2019, the group was exploring evidence-based mitigation options for Lismore. When the draft NSW Far North Coast Regional Water Strategy document was released in late 2020, it made no mention of flood risk in the region. This glaring omission highlighted a deeper issue: NSW lacked the data and capability to integrate flood mitigation into regional planning.
With the City already enduring over a decade of stagnation and decline this issue could not be overlooked and so the newly formed Our Future Northern Rivers publicly called for an independent review into the draft NSW North Coast Regional Water Strategy document. By mid-2021, the NSW Government commissioned the CSIRO to conduct a desktop review. The result: 43 recommendations and a lesson for the future. None of the National Science agencies recommendations were adopted by the NSW department.
Upon release of the final Regional Strategy document, community concerns were confirmed, but no action followed. Instead, the burden of addressing flood mitigation was shifted back to the regions struggling local councils, who have traditionally lacked the necessary resources and expertise to investigate solutions for the regions complex catchment.
In response, Our Future Northern Rivers turned to the Federal Government. By late 2021, the group successfully secured support from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) for a comprehensive, catchment-wide flood modelling project.
Immediately following the catastrophic floods of late February 2022, funding was approved for the Northern Rivers Resilience Initiative (NRRI). By 30 June 2025, after three years of serious commitment by the CSIRO a world-class, state-of-the-art hydrodynamic flood model has been successfully developed. The model is capable of simulating past events and identifying effective mitigation strategies for the region’s future.
www.csiro.au/en/research/disasters/floods/northern-nsw-resilience-initiative