BCG advises Minderoo on its fire & flood resilience blueprint
With Australia’s hottest months just around the corner, the Minderoo Foundation has drafted a plan to make Australia the leading nation in fire and flood resilience. The blueprint was created with the support of consultants from Boston Consulting Group.
The 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season, which stretched from June 2019 to March 2020, devastated portions of the country, scorching an estimated 46 million acres, destroying more than 5,900 buildings (including 2,779 homes), and killing at least 34 people.
While last year was a record breaker for bushfires, however, the New South Wales Bushfire Inquiry recently stated that while the event was “extreme, and extremely unusual” by historical standards, accelerating climate change meant “we should expect fire seasons like 2019-20, or potentially worse, to happen again.”
More broadly, fires and floods have wreaked havoc on Australian communities since the turn of the century, taking over 350 lives and causing irreversible damage to communities, livelihoods and landscapes. It has become clear that things are not likely to return to normality, and that Australia will need to adapt to the increasing regularity of natural disasters – something that a new initiative from the Minderoo Foundation seeks to help with.
Minderoo’s new Resilience Blueprint presents a plan for lifting Australia to be the global leader in fire and flood resilience by 2025. The plan includes a number of different core missions, including reducing the scale of bushfires by locating and extinguishing them quickly, investing in vulnerable communities to boost their resilience, and optimising the environment to fortify ecosystem resilience.
Minderoo’s Chair and Co-Chair Andrew Forrest and Nicola Forrest commented on the opening phase of the plan, “Our first mission, Fire Shield, aims to ensure no dangerous bushfire in Australia will burn longer than an hour by 2025. This extraordinary task will require unprecedented cooperation across communities, governments, industry, not for profits and the research sector. It is the kind of challenge we are prepared to take on: to assist in its orchestration, bringing together the best minds and ideas in lockstep with partners, and most importantly emergency services.”
The blueprint was produced in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group and a host of other public and private organisations. The breadth of entities involved is hoped to help reach every corner of society, and Minderoo welcomes further collaboration to build on the blueprint and mobilise its missions for a fire and flood resilient Australia.
Wendy Mackay, Partner and Managing Director at BCG, said of the blueprint’s launch, “Congratulations Minderoo team on the launch of the blueprint. Boston Consulting Group is very proud to have collaborated on this work, alongside the other partners.”
