Building water resilience through shared lessons from Australia and Vietnam

As climate extremes intensify, communities across Australia and the Asia–Pacific are confronting a shared reality: disasters are arriving more often, hitting harder, and leaving less time to recover before the next event.

Repeated flooding in South East Queensland (SEQ) has tested infrastructure, governance and community capacity, while Vietnam has long experienced destructive typhoons, putting enormous pressure on local water systems and public health.

In this context, community resilience has become as important as planning and response. The question is no longer if floods or cyclones will strike, but how well communities can absorb the impact, rebuild and adapt for the future.

Building resilience

Unitywater CEO Anna Jackson points to Tropical Cyclone Alfred in February 2025 as a reminder of what proactive planning can achieve. With advance warning, the utility was able to prepare both its network and its customers, resulting in less than 100 customers experiencing outages during the event, instead of thousands.

“Prior experience has taught us that power outages and the ability to have multiple rounds of backup generation available for key infrastructure is critical,” Jackson said. “We also brought forward some of our standard maintenance programs, such as the integrity of our water reservoir roofs.”

Unitywater has also worked hard to get the vast majority of its customer base receiving digital communications, so that it can communicate quickly and effectively during major events.

“We used this to set our customers’ expectations in the event of outages, such as additional waiting times and prioritising the safety of our workers in the field, as well as how to prepare their households and businesses,” she said.

Extreme rainfall also creates less visible challenges. Large downpours can distort public perceptions of water security, making long-term planning more difficult outside drought periods. “It’s much easier to have a conversation about water security in drought,” Jackson said.

“It’s harder when you’re dealing with significant rainfall, even though that water doesn’t fall where or when you need it.”

Jackson said proactivity has been “an absolute game changer” for the community, policymakers, and Unitywater itself. Infrastructure choices have shifted toward climate tolerance, replacing rigid asbestos cement pipes with flexible PVC pipes to accommodate soil movement, while increasing the depth of trunk infrastructure through horizontal directional drilling to reduce exposure.

“When you get these wild weather events, most of the infrastructure stands up pretty well,” Jackson said.

Embedding risk

In the 2024-25 financial year, parts of SEQ experienced double the average rainfall, and it wasn’t simply due to Alfred, which was more of a wind than a rain event. Also feeling the brunt of the cyclone, Urban Utilities faced what CEO Paul Arnold describes as “a trilemma” of renewing aging assets, meeting extraordinary population growth, and improving resilience to extreme weather events.

Urban Utilities responded by embedding climate risk into everyday planning and modelling, rather than treating resilience as a standalone program.

“Our modelling looks at how climate risk can impact our network, our people and our communities at the same time,” Arnold said.

“That helps us prioritise where our investment is best placed, that also extends into our routine operations, including educating communities and households.”

Household water storage, once peripheral, is now standard messaging. “We emphasise having 10 litres of water per person in emergency kits,” Arnold said. “Two years ago, that wasn’t talked about. Now it’s part of the narrative.”

On the infrastructure side, utilities are accepting that some assets cannot be fully flood-proofed, but recovery time can be dramatically reduced.

During Cyclone Alfred, Urban Utilities deployed a custom, demountable flood barrier to protect critical components of a wastewater treatment plant, reducing restoration time after the event. Electrical equipment is being elevated above floodplains, recognising that loss of control systems, rather than concrete structures, often drives outages.

The $70 million Cannery Creek project near Nudgee exemplifies this approach. Designed to manage high-rainfall events rather than rare floods, the project uses wetland-style infrastructure to absorb overflows, shaped by extensive community consultation.

“These events are more frequent now than they were 10 years ago,” Arnold said. “The solution had to reflect that.”

Looking abroad

Vietnam’s water sector operates under even tighter constraints. The country experiences an average of 10–12 typhoons or tropical depressions each year, with increasing intensity and reduced recovery time.

Historic floods in November 2025 in the country’s north saw floodwaters rise 1.6 metres above previously recorded levels, submerging pumps, control panels and backup generators, and forcing a complete shutdown of production. Heavy sedimentation damaged intake infrastructure, while power and telecommunications failures delayed access for emergency services.

The Khanh Hoa Water Supply Joint Stock Company was a utility on the frontline of the disaster. Chairman Vu Van Binh said that despite such a catastrophic incident, operations were restored within 16 hours, prioritising the “provision of water for drinking and essential domestic use, particularly for vulnerable communities”.

In response to the flood, the utility identified several critical capital investments required to strengthen long-term climate resilience, Vue said.

“Top priorities include high- accuracy forecasting systems for rainfall, storms, and droughts; early warning systems for reservoir and dam releases; and software tools to support coordinated multi-reservoir operations, enabling more effective water regulation under extreme conditions,” he said.

Learning together

Institute of Water Supply, Sewerage and Environment Director Doan Thu Ha said Vietnamese and SEQ utilities share familiar vulnerabilities, including recurrent flooding, pressure on infrastructure and managing recovery efforts in difficult circumstances.

“Remote, island and low-income communities are often more severely affected due to limited infrastructure redundancy and difficulties accessing electricity, transport and information during and after storms,” Doan said.

“The most significant equity gap lies in access to safe and reliable water services during emergencies, highlighting the need for targeted investment and focused technical support for vulnerable communities.”

Through these commonalities, each can learn from the strengths of the other, she said.

“Australia has strong expertise in risk-based planning, flood modelling and long-term asset management,” Doan said, “while Vietnam has extensive hands-on experience responding to repeated climate shocks.”

Arnold said this is where structured collaboration matters. Through the AWA International Development Program, staff exchanges wih Can Tho Water Supply and Sewage Company have focused on climate-smart water resilience under extremes of drought and flood.

“Engagement is a feature of the water sector,” Arnold said. “There’s a shared commitment to outcomes for the community.”

Jackson agrees that learning flowed both ways.

“We’ve learned a lot from partnerships with utilities in the Asia Pacific region, particularly around approaches to field work,” she said.

“I’m very much in favour of us learning from others as much as we can and sharing what we’ve found is useful, too.”

Forming partnerships

For Vietnamese utilities, targeted international collaboration, particularly in terms of technical assistance and knowledge-sharing, could accelerate adaptation where resources are constrained.

Vu said that Khanh Hoa Water Supply identified flood forecasting, early warning, sediment-resilient intake design and treatment plant protection as immediate priorities where Australian expertise could add value.

At a sector level, Doan argues international support is most effective when it combines technical assistance with flexible financing and data sharing, particularly for vulnerable regions dealing with flood management and post-disaster recovery.

For Australia, the lesson is similarly pragmatic. As extreme events stack up, resilience is increasingly shaped by integrated approaches that link power supply, control systems, community preparedness and recovery pathways, rather than by any single asset or intervention. Vietnam’s experience illustrates the consequences of escalating frequency and intensity: when recovery windows shrink, even well-designed systems are pushed to their limits.

This article was first published in AWA’s Current magazine. Take a look at the edition on Indigo.