Triage approaches in river management prioritise investment and effort in these complex physical and social systems. Such triage is increasingly required as climate change intensifies flood disturbance, geomorphic instability, and pressure on riverine ecosystems across Australia, requiring more investment decisions. This paper examines the practical realities of river management triage through recent Australian rehabilitation and flood recovery programs. Modern triage approaches emphasise values. Streams represent ‘intrinsic’ biodiversity and conservation values, as well as a bundle of human values, which are often represented as ecosystem services. Streams can also threaten many values, usually by erosion, deposition, or poor water quality. While the broadly-based conservation-based approach is widely accepted in theory, contemporary investment patterns often revert to narrowly defined and reactive post-disaster responses that focus on visible erosion threats.
This paper describes the application of an integrated, resilience-based triage in the Tropical Cyclone Jasper Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA) riverine recovery project across 12 Far North Queensland catchments. The project applied a spatially explicit prioritisation framework integrating river condition, recovery potential, geomorphic threats, connectivity, and ecosystem services to strategically target rehabilitation investment. This paper argues that increasing climatic disturbance will require river management approaches that move beyond reactive erosion repair toward integrated resilience-based triage frameworks capable of addressing the multiple, connected values and threats operating across catchments. The Jasper project illustrates how resilience frameworks can be translated into transparent, repeatable investment decisions at catchment scale using disaster recovery funding.