AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005

Workshop opening
Chair: Dr John Zillman

NAF – the National Academies Forum – is the peak body of Australia’s four learned academies. One of its most important roles is to harness the national expertise across the natural and social sciences, humanities and engineering, for advice to government on important cross-cutting, interdisciplinary issues such as this.

The Australian academies individually and collectively, through NAF, have focused a lot of attention on natural disaster reduction over the past 30 years, including the major NAF-sponsored conference on the Gold Coast in 1996 as a mid-decade assessment of Australian contribution to the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR).

One major achievement of the IDNDR, and especially, I think, of Australia’s contribution to it, was the much greater emphasis that now exists worldwide on risk assessment, preparedness, disaster prevention, through capacity building, implementation of warning systems and the like.

Yet even in the wake of the huge achievements of the IDNDR, the tsunami of 26 December produced a loss of life that was more than an order of magnitude larger than anything from a similar event during the 20th century. We are all well aware that enormous numbers of meetings and studies have been going on around the world over the past three months, focusing both on the immediate recovery process and on learning the long-term lessons of 26 December. Much is happening bilaterally and multilaterally under the auspices of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), the Global Alliance for Disaster Reduction (GADR), the UN agencies, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, and so on.

The Joint Academies Group, which has organised this workshop in collaboration with the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) and with the support of the ARC and others, sees our particular task today as that of exploring and assessing how Australian expertise in the sciences, humanities, technologies and engineering – and especially those in the academic communities and other non-government sectors not readily accessed by government through other channels – can be most effectively brought to bear, both on the current process of recovery and for the long term.

The Prime Minister has been briefed on this workshop and he is looking forward to the advice that we will assemble in our report.