This session demonstrates that genuine climate resilience is strengthened through the integration of cultural infrastructure into adaptation strategies, ensuring that responses to climate change are contextually relevant, place-based, and informed by millennia of relevant environmental insights. Drawing on the presenter’s personal experience as an Aboriginal woman from the Gamilaraay Nation, raised in the Yolngu homelands of the Northern Territory, it explores “cultural infrastructure”—traditional stories, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and Observations of TEK—as foundational elements of community resilience.

By examining how cultural infrastructure functions across long-, medium-, and short-term scales, the research shows how First Nations communities interpret environmental shifts, anticipate changing conditions, and mount effective responses to challenges like floods, droughts, and temperature extremes. It further explains how culturally grounded frameworks can be woven throughout mainstream climate adaptation and disaster management plans.

By weaving together Indigenous knowledges and modern climate practices, I propose a culturally grounded framework for addressing climate impacts at a local and stage level. This framework recognises the leadership of First Nations communities as central to any climate resilience program. It respects the intellectual property rights of traditional knowledge while affirming their inherent value in shaping policy and practice.

In the wake of the Referendum and alongside emerging discussions on First Nations governance, this approach charts a path for our northern regions—one that honours Country, safeguards cultural heritage, and builds unified resilience. Nation-building in the North depends on recognising and elevating First Nations leadership, ensuring that our cultural infrastructure guides all strategies for adapting to a changing climate.