CRC Program Review and New National Research Priorities

At the annual Cooperative Research Centres Association conference in Canberra last week, there was extensive discussion of the recently released review of the Cooperative Research Centres Programme – the Miles Report. The report importantly acknowledged the value and the economic gains to the country of the program. It does however propose a tightening of the program guidelines, to better align to the Industry Growth Centres announced by the Government some time ago, and to better focus on the needs of industry more generally.  It also recommended removing the specific ‘priority public good mechanism’ (Rec 16). It further recommended that the CRC lifetime be for one term of up to 10 years, with no rebid. The Government has accepted all the recomendations.

Importantly for us in the short term nothing changes, we have a contractual commitment to deliver our research plan. There is a recommendation that all current CRCs be reviewed by the new CRC Advisory Committee (Rec. 10) to ensure ‘that they are performing in accordance with their funding agreement and are likely to deliver against their stated outcomes.’ While we do not know when or in what form such a review will take, it is worth noting that we had our first year review seven months ago and no issues were raised, and as long as we remain focussed on the tasks at hand and continue the great engagement between the end-users (our industry) and the research teams there should be no problems.

Also at the conference the Prime Minister, announced the new National Research Priorities. The nine cross-disciplinary priorities are food, soil and water, transport, cybersecurity, energy, resources, advanced manufacturing, environmental change and health.  

The interesting one for us in the one focusing on Environmental Change which states:

PRIORITY 7: ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Mitigating, managing or adapting to changes in the environment.

The Australian environment is a living system in a constant state of change and with a highly variable climate. To be resilient towards the changing environment, communities need to adapt to new conditions and be prepared to withstand and respond to extreme events.

Australians are experienced in confronting the impacts of drought, heatwaves, bushfires, cyclones and floods. In recent years, insurance claims, infrastructure repair, and lost productivity have cost the economy tens of billions of dollars. For example, the cost of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires to Victoria was estimated to be about $4.4 billion, the Queensland floods of 2010-11 cost in excess of $5 billion, and the Sydney hailstorm of 14 April 1999 was Australia’s most costly storm in terms of insured losses, totalling $4.3 billion.

Due to the global dimension and ongoing nature of environmental changes, there is a growing need to improve our understanding of the processes, impacts and the mitigation and adaptation strategies required.
Research will increase our understanding of environmental change, and support the development of options for change management.

This underscores the importance of what the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC is doing and that it is recognised at the highest levels of government.