As summer begins, the State of the Climate Report 2024 released by the CSIRO and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology in October makes for grim reading. Australia's climate has warmed by an average of 1.51°C since national records began. Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, and heavy short-term rainfall events more intense. Longer fire seasons are expected.
In this, Australia is alarmingly in sync with its region. The World Meteorological Organisation’s regional State of the Climate in Asia report released earlier in the year confirmed that Asia remains the world’s most disaster-plagued region. And the latest Asia-Pacific Disaster Report of the United Nations’ Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) finds that a “riskscape of complex, compound and cascading disasters is emerging” that is “outpacing the region’s resilience”.
Yet without having adopted any strategy on disaster diplomacy – that is, diplomacy concerned with the significance of disaster-related activities for international conflict and cooperation – to complement its National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, Australia remains woefully underprepared to grapple with the new regional reality.
Australia’s approach to international HADR coordination is underdeveloped, under-resourced and over-securitised.
Australia does have a long history of approaching humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) regionally, recognising that disaster impacts have no regard for borders. Regional cooperation in this area has been ongoing for more than a century. Australia’s first overseas emergency relief operation, launched in 1918, provided medical assistance and relief to Samoa, Fiji and Tonga.
More recently, HADR has become a prominent dimension of regional security cooperation. This is in part with an eye to geopolitical competition and worries about HADR normalising a Chinese security presence in the region. In 2022, Australia joined with India, Japan and the United States to form the Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) in the Indo-Pacific. In October this year, the South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting endorsed the establishment of a Pacific Response Group: a multinational military cooperation initiative, spearheaded by Australia, to foster coordination in delivering HADR support.
Even so, Australia’s approach to international HADR coordination is underdeveloped, under-resourced and over-securitised. Australia’s development assistance and foreign aid capabilities have been steadily eroded and outsourced over the past decade, as others have observed here before. Australian disaster diplomacy is either consigned to this emaciated sector or excessively reliant on military forces ill-suited to leading HADR efforts.
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has been candid about the limits of its capability to meet domestic HADR needs, let alone those of the region. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review argued that involving the ADF too much in HADR risked compromising “force preparedness, readiness and combat effectiveness”; its preference is to be a “force of last resort”. In addition, there is an extensive body of scholarship elucidating how the securitisation of HADR serves to privilege certain actors over others “while circumscribing the range of applicable solutions”.
Australia is engaged non-militarily in the HADR field too. HADR features as a dimension of “socio-cultural cooperation” in the Plan of Action to Implement the ASEAN–Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (2025–2029). A commitment to partnering with governments and communities regionally to support their HADR efforts is a key theme of Australia’s International Development Policy. And Australia’s recently launched Humanitarian Policy commits to “investing further in early warning systems and anticipatory action initiatives” to foster better disaster preparedness regionwide. Australia’s support for the Pacific Humanitarian Warehousing Program appears to bear out this commitment.
Australia is still conducting disaster diplomacy in a reactive, myopic and piecemeal fashion, mostly bilaterally.
Nonetheless, Australia is still conducting disaster diplomacy in a reactive, myopic and piecemeal fashion, mostly bilaterally. Disaster does not rate so much as a mention in Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040 for instance. That is despite ESCAP estimating current annual losses from natural and biological hazards in the Asia-Pacific at around US$780 billion, projected to rise to US$1.1 trillion or US$1.4 trillion annually under two different climate change scenarios. Notwithstanding Australia committing, in its Humanitarian Policy, to “harnessing innovation, science and technology” to predict and plan for disaster regionally, the Data and Digital Government Strategy likewise omits any corresponding considerations or commitments. It does not manifest any concern with how disasters might bear on digital connectivity or vice versa, either nationally or regionally.
Australia’s approach in this regard is in marked contrast to the approach of Singapore, which has for more than a decade been carving out a strategic role for itself in HADR information brokerage and coordination that could, in time, become comparable to its importance as the world’s most successful shipping hub. India has likewise shown regional leadership in disaster diplomacy, by establishing the South Asia Association of Regional Cooperation Disaster Management Centre for instance.
Australia should aspire to become a regional leader in disaster diplomacy. In line with the emphasis placed on people-centred approaches in the ASEAN Vision 2025 on Disaster Management, this should include investment to redress decades-long underfunding of Australia's diplomatic corps, bolstering its ranks with dedicated disaster diplomats. Alongside technical collaborations (on early warning infrastructure, for instance) and military cooperation, this investment should aim at enhancing trust, and capacities for communication, partnership, investment, engagement and planning along global and regional corridors of greatest disaster risk and vulnerability. A vital first step is for Australia to adopt an ambitious, whole-of-government disaster diplomacy strategy.
