CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, must always evolve and adapt.
Over the past 100 years, we have evolved our scientific focus to meet the most important challenges of the time and in doing so have maintained the trust of the community.
We have also adapted to financial pressures, growing during good times and becoming more focused when money is tight, delivering impact to the nation throughout.
While we have delivered extraordinary benefits, over time, our resources have become stretched, and we have reached a critical point.
As today's stewards of CSIRO, we are determined to again evolve and adapt. This is not a choice, it's an imperative because scientific research and development are at the core of Australia's future.
In recent decades, CSIRO has been managing budgets year-to-year while trying to maintain the breadth of our programs and the size of our dedicated workforce, currently 5600 people.
We are now at a point where that is not possible within our existing budget.
Over the past 15 years, our appropriation has increased by 1.3 per cent per year, with the average inflation rate at 2.7 per cent, and the costs of running a modern science agency are rising much faster.
For example, the cost of computing has soared as greater amounts of data are generated, and the cost of protecting our data and people from cyber security threats has risen dramatically compared to just a few years ago.
CSIRO is not unique in facing financial pressures - every household in Australia understands the cost-of-living crisis and how it drives extraordinarily difficult choices to be made.
What is unique is the scale of CSIRO's challenge, which has grown over time.
As the national agency, we have 45 sites across every state and territory in metropolitan, rural and remote areas.
We have more than 800 buildings and scientific facilities that we run on behalf of the nation.
These include labs, telescopes, farms, offices, a marine research vessel, experimental bushfire tunnel, vaults holding 13 million biodiversity specimens and the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) which protects our agriculture and community from biosecurity threats.
Over the past decade, as our financial position has become tighter, we have prioritised doing everything we can to maintain the size of our workforce over spending money on maintaining our scientific facilities.
We can no longer continue on this path.
More than 80 per cent of our 840 buildings are past their technical end of life, we have a $280 million backlog of repair and maintenance and the cost of refurbishing a single facility like ACDP, which is a decade overdue, will be around a billion dollars.
This is neither supporting our science nor serving Australians well and, if left unchecked, will pose an unacceptable safety risk for staff.
We need a new mindset.
Over the past 18 months, our focus has shifted to ensuring CSIRO can be sustainable, safe, vibrant and deliver the incredible impact that Australians expect, irrespective of our budget.
To do this we are making the hard choices the community expect us to make.
Following a comprehensive review of our entire research portfolio, we will focus our science on those areas where we can deliver impact at scale. Some of those areas include transitioning to net zero with clean, reliable and affordable energy; finding clean and green ways of processing critical minerals into critical materials that can be used to further develop advanced manufacturing in Australia, and ensuring we can adapt and become resilient to climate change and protect our agricultural sector, environment and communities against biosecurity threats.
Focusing means we will also deprioritise some research areas where we don't have the scale to achieve significant impact, or areas where others in the research ecosystem are better placed to deliver.
These are difficult decisions that profoundly impact talented and passionate colleagues and their families. We'll seek to mitigate impacts as much as possible; however, the reality is that to focus our research portfolio, between 300 and 350 staff will potentially be impacted.
In addition to these immediate staffing impacts, to put us on a pathway to longer term sustainability, where our facilities are universally well maintained and remain safe, our equipment is fit for purpose and we are cyber secure, we also need to invest between $80 million and $135 million per annum for the next 10 years.
Despite these challenging times, I am optimistic about the future. The widespread support for CSIRO and the community's trust in science gives me confidence that we will provide the research Australia so desperately needs to flourish in the decades ahead.
Dr Doug Hilton is the chief executive of CSIRO.
This article was originally published by The Canberra Times.