The SQNNSW Hub
The Southern Queensland and Northern NSW Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub is a part of the national Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hubs program, which aims to help farmers and communities prepare for climate extremes, such as drought and floods, by connecting them with regional agricultural experts, locally relevant research, innovation, and new practices.
The Hub supports producers and their communities in growing resilience to manage climate variability through innovation, collaboration, and building capacity and capability.
The Hub covers the region from Longreach in Queensland to Dubbo in New South Wales and from the coast to the Southern Australian & Northern Territory borders in the west. It works with a range of industries, including livestock, broadacre cropping, cotton, horticulture, viticulture, tree crops, and sugarcane.
The Lismore Node
The Lismore Node is being led by a team at Southern Cross University. This includes Knowledge Broker Amanda Scott and Partnership Brokers Rebecca Lollback and Gavin Tinning.
The team’s goal is to enhance the capabilities of existing networks to support farmers in managing resilient, profitable, functional and biodiverse landscapes.
Our strengths
Sustainable farming
We work with farmers, SCU researchers, Landcare, community organisations and industry to share knowledge, support existing activities, and connect people across the NSW North Coast. Our work supports research and applied projects related to soil health, pasture dieback, multi species pastures, dung beetle diversity, enhancing farm dams, local food production and more. We strive to find and deliver practical, locally relevant solutions to the challenges facing farmers in this region.
Improving landscape function
Farming landscapes on the NSW north coast are degraded from historical changes to land use and loss of landscape function. This is evidenced by soil erosion, loss of wetlands, reduction in water quality and catchment health and increasing challenges in maintaining farm productivity. Our team supports local farmers and partners to improve landscape function on farms and catchments by restoring local water cycles, building organic matter in soils, and slowing and spreading runoff from heavy rainfall events. This helps maintain soil moisture for longer into dry periods, ultimately increasing plant growth and production.
Research translation and knowledge sharing
Our team has a strong track record in building capability in research translation and impact through the design, delivery and evaluation of targeted programs. We specialise in helping researchers move beyond academic outputs to create real-world benefits by developing their skills and confidence in impact planning, engagement, communication, and knowledge exchange.
Network analysis
Effective responses to complex challenges, such as climate resilience, depend on strong, collaborative networks. Our expertise focuses on understanding, measuring and strengthening the relationships, trust and patterns of interaction that underpin successful collaboration. Using approaches such as longitudinal social network analysis, we make the often-invisible infrastructure of collaboration visible, providing evidence to support network design, governance and performance.