MANY of the Kimberley region's 2339 kilometres of State roads and 4579km of local roads have been severely damaged by the floods from Ex-Tropical Cyclone Ellie.
The flooded area is culturally and economically rich and a major contributor to the Australian economy with transport networks that supply goods to the region as well as to domestic and international customers.
Beef and iron ore are cases in point.
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The road and rail networks are the veins that supply north Western Australia's body of commercial prosperity.
The sophisticated engineering required to rebuild these road networks to handle the heavy haulage vehicles needed in the area is expected to take months, if not years.
Flooding is an annual occurrence in the Kimberley but the events of early January, 2023, combined with the 2022 floods in regional New South Wales, have added validity to calculations that natural disasters cost the Australian economy $36 billion in 2020 with a conservative estimated forecast of $73b per year by 2060.
The Kimberley cattle herd is about 700,000 head and there is no doubt that damaged road networks will harm the herd, its producers and supply chain in a number of ways.
In the short-term it is difficult to estimate losses - both animals that perished and animals injured - but air drops of feed have been received to support isolated livestock.
Animal welfare is front-and-centre of producers' minds so feeding will need to continue between the flood waters subsiding and sufficient new feed sprouting.
Providing feed via air drops is not sustainable beyond the short-term due to prohibitive costs, so road transport of feed is essential.
In the longer term - perhaps heading into the middle of 2023 - feed will likely be abundant but the closure of roads that service beef markets may be a disruption to the fulfilment of processor and exporter contracts.
Analysts will be carefully watching market activity to determine if this potential inability to service markets will result in buyers pivoting to competitors for maintaining product the flows into their processing works.
Depending on the magnitude of stock losses and the duration of road closures, restocking the Kimberley herd may be challenging.
If new stock need to be freighted-in, where will they come from, how will they get there and what will be the cost?
Particularly when cattle prices and diesel prices are so high.
WA has about 150,000km of roads, of which 87 per cent are maintained by local governments - excluding the Department of Parks and Wildlife which add another 38km.
Of these roads, only one is economically viable to move goods in and out of the State.
From a risk management perspective, this is not good enough.
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This risk needs to be managed by the State government diverting its attention from city-based passenger transport infrastructure projects to regional transport networks to secure the State's current economic prosperity.
The next solution is to break the rules that have made supply chains so successful over the past 40 years and ensure inventory, such as feed and farm supplies, are decentralised beyond the outskirts of major cities.
Decentralisation of inventories will allow more rapid, agile responses in the event of a natural disaster.
Supply chain redesign that will inevitably incur suppliers' transaction costs however, a business-as-usual scenario is also an expensive option in the face of increasing and more prolific natural disasters.
Elizabeth Jackson is an associate professor of supply chain management and logistics, School of Management and Marketing at Curtin University.
