Building food system resilience in the face of severe and compounding disasters: collaborative disaster food security management insights from northern New South Wales, Australia

Abstract The ‘Northern Rivers’ region in the state of New South Wales (central east coast of Australia) has experienced recurrent food supply chain disruptions in recent years due to large-scale compounding disasters, including catastrophic flooding in 2022. The authors investigated barriers, enablers, and cross-cutting themes for organisations in this region to manage food security, spanning public, private and civic sectors. Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with food system leaders, decision-makers, managers and emergency food response coordinators from the region. Cross-cutting themes identified focused on developing integrative policy reform, building formal networks across sectors, enabling local resourcing for rapid disaster recovery and enabling systemic solutions for food redundancies. Findings revealed strengths in government leadership and collaborative disaster management in the agricultural sector. Alongside, post-disaster food provision relies heavily upon civic leadership and regional supply chains, enabled through informal networks of trust, however, hindered by ad hoc planning and deficits in public sector leadership and engagement. As civic food organisations are largely assuming responsibilities for post-disaster food access, pre-positioning organisations to manage this effectively is critical, especially mechanisms for collaborative preparedness and lesson learning. Capacity for joint action across sectors could be enabled through disaster food security planning having a broad, regional scope and inclusive participation of relevant local stakeholders. Insights from this research inform food security planning and policymaking that accounts for severe and compounding disasters and are broadly applicable to other coastal and regional settlements in Australia that are vulnerable to flooding.