Australia’s increasingly severe and intense weather events over recent years have placed immense pressure on the national regional, rural, and remote road network and tremendous strain on communities, businesses, and freight systems. The unprecedented scale, intensity, and duration of floods and torrential rains in 2022 and 2023 caused catastrophic damage to Australia's road infrastructure, exposing its vulnerability against severe weather events and a changing climate.

Road networks are vital to the nation’s socio-economic sustainability, ensuring communities remain connected to essential health services, food and fuel supplies, social activities, culture, and to each other. A well designed and functional road network is also crucial to ensuring the safe and efficient evacuation of communities during and following natural disaster events.

This report explores road infrastructure resilience across a range of interdependent issues, including Australia's varied and increasingly unpredictable climate risks, government investment in the resilience of our road network, disaster recovery funding to build back better, the application of innovative, recyclable road material technologies to aid resilience and a circular economy, construction workforce issues, and broader whole-of-system dependencies.