Through its national Nature-led Resilience Program, NRM Regions Australia is seeking to address key barriers currently preventing the wider adoption and scaling up of Nature-based Solutions¹ (NbS) for climate adaptation and disaster resilience in Australia, including:
- Lack of acknowledgement of NbS in policy,
- Limited availability of evidence demonstrating NbS’ benefits,
- An absence of clear definitions, guidelines and methodologies to guide design, implementation, and evaluation of NbS, and
- A lack of investment mechanisms to support NbS.
Australia’s regional NRM (Natural Resource Management) organisations are well placed to deliver this work, as they play a key role in the coordination and delivery of disaster and climate resilience while also supporting biodiversity and ecosystems targets through the implementation of NbS. The initial program phase is:
(1) Delivering field trials of NbS for flood and fire resilience in Australian conditions, such as:
• Living or ‘green’ fire breaks.
• Riparian restoration and management to mitigate flood risks.
• Rehydration of landscapes and stabilisation of hydrology to reduce flood and bushfire risks.
• First-Nations led cultural fire management.
(2) Evaluating the benefits of NbS for disaster risk reduction.
(3) Developing a National Impact Framework to standardise quantification of benefits.
(4) Identifying policy and planning reforms to enable greater uptake of NbS in Australia.

This presentation will highlight progress through the national program so far, including early results from field trials, and evaluation of NbS benefits. These findings are of interest to a wide audience with relevance to climate adaptation, the nature positive agenda, valuation of nature, and integrated and regional approaches to landscape management.

¹Nature-based solutions (NbS) are actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore ecosystems to address societal challenges like climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, food and water security, and biodiversity conservation.

Disaster recovery funding in Australia remains largely reactive, with the majority directed toward short-term relief and restoration of pre-disaster conditions. This approach often reinforces outdated land management practices and overlooks opportunities for transformative change. Following the Cudlee Creek bushfires, Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu reimagined recovery by transitioning from conventional support to a proactive stewardship model, embedding Nature-based Solutions (NbS) into long-term land management across public and private lands.
This paper presents a practitioner-led case study of this transition, highlighting how community engagement, ecological restoration, and capacity building were used to catalyse climate adaptation and landscape-scale resilience. Over two years, the program supported over 800 hectares of weed control, 19 km of fire-proof riparian fencing, and the planting of more than 80,000 native plants - many through community-led revegetation events. Tailored incentives, regenerative agriculture workshops, and native grass seed orchards were paired with strategic communications to drive uptake and build ecological literacy.
Crucially, the learnings from the Bushfire Recovery Program have been embedded into the newly established Landscape Stewardship Program, now a core part of the Board’s operational model. This program retains the “relationships-first” approach, continuing to deliver community-shaped capacity building, seasonal land management support, and on-ground action. The stewardship model ensures continuity for fire-affected communities and expands NbS across the region, positioning landholders to better respond to future climate extremes.
Survey data revealed that over 80% of participants felt more prepared for future bushfires and climate impacts, with many reporting their properties were “better than before.” This work demonstrates how NbS can be scaled through community-led design, flexible funding mechanisms, and evidence-based engagement, offering a replicable model for integrating disaster recovery with climate adaptation and ecological resilience.

This presentation looks at the potential of roadside verges (nature strips) as a site of climate and biodiversity resilience. Nature strips are a widespread, and by definition well connected, site of public land with significant collective potential to contribute towards practical, nature based, approaches to these issues.
I look at some of the barriers to the optimal use of roadside verges for and the ways that place and context specific design might be able to respond to these.
I also highlight the potential wins that thoughtful design, implementation and management of roadside verges for both climate resilience and biodiversity could bring, within these domains. I also touch on ‘win-win’ benefits beyond, for example to human health and to pasture production.
The presentation is focused mainly on planting but also landscape management and land management.
The paper draws on a set of Guidelines for Nature Strip Biodiversity that I developed as a community advocate/activist in my local council area. It also relates to a recent experience where as a result of a dispute about verge planting I had done outside my farm, my local council (who ultimately removed my planting) elaborated some of the concerns which can work against optimal design and management of nature strips for biodiversity and climate resilience.

Addressing the impacts of climate, land-use, and technological changes on people and nature requires sustained investment. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are key for resilience and meeting global sustainability, adaptation, biodiversity and disaster risk reduction goals, yet need significant private sector involvement due to the scale of investment required. Recent experiences in NbS projects highlight challenges and opportunities to attract investments of sufficient scope and scale to meet immediate and longer-term production, adaptation, and biodiversity outcomes under increasing climate, environmental and economic drivers. Addressing these issues and opportunities requires investment systems that attract funding and financing for NbS programs that are coordinated at the landscape level to deliver ‘climate ready’ landscape-scale outcomes for people and nature. However, prevailing approaches to investing in NbS are predominantly project-based, publicly or philanthropically funded, and narrowly focused on short-term, ‘price-based’ instruments. As such they are unlikely to deliver on the scale and coordination of investment required for sustainability under a changing climate. There are emerging examples of novel governance and investment arrangements being experimented with to address these limitations; but no playbook or over-arching framework to inform and support these efforts. In this talk I present a framework for landscape investment to address sustainability, disaster risk reduction, and resilience-building, and describe emerging lessons from a pilot application in the Limestone Coast region. The framework describes an Investment Cycle, comprising six generic steps in delivering investment; and a Landscape Investment System comprising four capabilities required to deliver landscape investment. Emerging lessons focus on: the adaptive learning process focused on the ‘what and how’ of landscape investment and governance; the importance of developing shared understanding and language amongst stakeholders for ‘doing things differently’; how to generate and prioritise investment opportunities; and the capabilities required to grow a regions abilities for investing in landscapes.

Both in Australia and globally, there is a growing interest in the role of the finance sector in investing in biodiversity and supporting a 'nature-positive' future. However, to date, the bulk of research in this field has focused on biodiversity markets and the role that intiatives such as the twin Taskforce on Climate-Related and Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD and TNFD) can play in motivating investment, for example through driving investment in carbon and nature markets. Even within TCFD and TNFD approaches, initial research has emphasised the role these initiatives can play in revealing the impacts of industries on climate and nature, and the need for finance sector players such as investors and insurers to shape their portfolios to achieve net zero and nature positive targets. Comparatively little research attention has been given to how the industries that finance sector players support are dependent on nature and climate stability, and thus exposed to biodiversity loss, soil and water degradation and climate extremes, despite the systemic risks these global dynamics represent to the economy.

This research flips that approach, seeking to understand how a growing awareness of exposure to environmental risk is driving thinking in the finance sector, both globally and in Australia. Sitting at the nexus of climate and nature risk, nature-based solutions have a crucial, but underrecognised role to play in addressing these twin risks. With a focus on the insurance sector, I look at the ways that industry leaders, professional networks and global partnerships in the insurance industry are discussing climate and nature risk, the range of roles different parties see for their sector in supporting action to address these risks, and where restoring nature-led resilience fits within this thinking.

Resilient Investment stand at a crossroads. One path continues the status quo—optimising for short-term returns by simplifying complex systems into discrete, investable entities, in which nature, communities, and infrastructure are planned for and managed in a predictable supply-chain. The other path embraces complexity, nurtures relationships, and unlocks the profound value that emerges when systems are treated as living, adaptive and interconnected landscapes – where nature, communities and infrastructure are in constant states of interaction, feedback and change.
Climate-KIC Australia collaborates with a national and global network of partners and have been laying the foundation for solving for these complex issues. We are building on the work developed by the Transformational Capital Initiative, to explore Systemic Finance in the Australian context.
We will provide an overview of learning from our previous work and our current planned portfolio of activity in systemic investing.
Our previous work includes:
- The Adaptation Finance Project, which explored how to build capabilities for systemic resilience investment by making systems thinking more accessible and actionable.
- The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable, a coalition of public, private, research, and NGO organisations, developed resources to improve investment decisions in resilience. This includes guidance to support organisations in building a strong business case for climate and disaster resilience investment, recognising the systemic and cascading nature of risks. The guidance, co-developed with CSIRO and Value Advisory Partners, provides a pathway for decision-makers to adopt a systemic lens in resilience investment.
Our emerging project portfolio includes:
- Shaping Markets for Nature based solutions for Disaster risk reduction
- Developing Nature Positive and Climate Water Positive Markets
- Advancing Urban Renewable Energy Zones with funding architecture that support distributed energy resilience value proposition
- Exploring concepts such as Climate Havens and Stormguard to invest in adaptive infrastructure and community resilience