Disaster Ready Fund, Round Three 2025-2026

The Disaster Ready Fund (DRF) is the Australian Government’s flagship disaster resilience and risk reduction initiative, which delivers up to $200 million of Commonwealth funding annually from 1 July 2023 to establish a comprehensive set of disaster resilience and mitigation projects across Australia, in partnership with Australian state, territory and local governments. The DRF will run over five years from 2023-24 to 2027-28.

DRF applicants must apply to the lead agency of each state/territory. Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) has been nominated by the Australian Government as the lead agency responsible for coordinating the overarching Victorian application to the DRF.

The primary objectives of the DRF are to:   

1. increase the understanding of natural hazard disaster impacts, as a first step towards reducing disaster impacts in the future;
2. increase the resilience, adaptive capacity and/or preparedness of governments, community service organisations and affected communities to minimise the potential impact of natural hazards and avert disasters; and
3. reduce the exposure to risk, harm and/or severity of a natural hazard’s impacts, including reducing the recovery burden for governments and vulnerable and/or affected communities.

Round Three is open for applications until Wednesday 2 April 2025.

More information on the DRF is available at Emergency Management Victoria's (EMV's) DRF web page and at the National Emergency Management Agency's (NEMA's) DRF web page.

It is essential that you read the Victorian Application Guide for the Disaster Ready Fund: Round Three, 2025-26 in conjunction with the Australian Government Disaster Ready Fund Round Three 2025-26 Guidelines, which detail the funding, requirements and eligibility criteria for the program. Applicants should note that the Australian Government has introduced a range of key changes for Round Three, which are detailed in both of the aforementioned documents.

• Closing date for submissions is 5pm, Wednesday 2 April 2025.
• Late submissions will not be accepted.
• Proposals will only be accepted by submitting this form.
• All questions marked with an asterisk must be completed to enable this form to be submitted.
• Depending on the nature of the project, you may not need to respond to all questions in the submission form.
• Once you have completed the form you must select the ‘Review and Submit’ tab.
• Due to the limited time allowed for the state review process, it is strongly recommended that all applicants rigorously review their application for accuracy, eligibility and completeness prior to submission.
• When you have finalised your submission and all the required fields have been completed, select the ‘Submit’ tab at the top of the form to submit your proposal.
• Upon submission of your proposal, you will receive an email confirmation and a copy of your proposal for your records.

If you do not receive the confirmation email, please contact EMV's Disaster Ready Fund team at drf@emv.vic.gov.au

There are a number of instances throughout the application form where you may be asked to provide evidence to support your response.

For all supporting documents provided throughout the application (both those identified as mandatory attachments and those optional), the amount of detail provided should be commensurate with the project size, complexity and grant amount requested (e.g. greater detail would be expected in the business case and budget for a $5 million project compared with a $250,000 project).

Please note that failure to provide any mandatory information and attachment may result in an application being ruled ineligible (e.g. if evidence of entity type is not provided) or be taken into account in assessing an application (e.g. if evidence of consultation or partner support is missing in circumstances where they are required).

(Maximum size limit per file is 10MB. Supported file formats include PDF, doc, docx and xlsx.)

Contact EMV's Disaster Ready Fund team at drf@emv.vic.gov.au