The new Australian Disaster Resilience Index: a tool for building safer, adaptable communities

An understanding of disaster resilience will help communities better prepare for, absorb and respond to natural hazards. A newly launched website helps explain and measure resilience so we can adapt and transform our communities for the better. 

By Communications Officer Bethany Patch from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. This article was first published in Issue Three 2020 of Fire Australia.

Australians are always learning to live with a changing, unpredictable and uncertain environment, of which natural hazards are an increasing part. We are all developing ways to cope with, adapt to and recover from changes in our lives. But how does your community adapt and respond to change, and how can this process be improved? What resources does your community have at its disposal when responding to a natural hazard? And how can these be transformed so that your community recovers more easily and quickly, and adapts its resources effectively to be better prepared next time?

Ms Suellen Flint, the Deputy State Recovery Coordinator at the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (WA) explains what makes a resilient community.

“At their best, communities are prepared, are able to adapt to changing situations, are connected to each other and are self-reliant,” said Ms Flint.
An understanding of disaster resilience focuses on ways that we can improve a community’s chance of adapting to future change, rather than focusing on its ability to react to hazards that have already occurred.

To support resilience across Australia, a new research-based website—the Australian Disaster Resilience Index—has been developed by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and the University of New England. 

The Index is open to anyone with an interest in understanding the resilience of their local community.

What does the Australian Disaster Resilience Index do?

The output of six years of CRC research, the Index provides a clear, detailed pathway to better understanding and measuring resilience across Australia. Businesses, governments, not-for-profits and community organisations can use it to improve their planning, development, policy, engagement and risk assessment. 

“The Index is capturing a national picture of disaster resilience,” said lead researcher Dr Melissa Parsons from the University of New England. “This national picture will help communities, governments and organisations further develop the capacities for adapting and coping with natural hazards.”

The Index gives you everything you need to start exploring the resilience of your community. It includes an interactive map that generates
data reports for specific areas, and information about the strengths and barriers to disaster resilience for each area. You can examine the resilience of your local community and start to plan for improved resilience.

The Index measures overall disaster resilience, as well as coping and adaptive capacity, by assessing eight key factors under two broad groups: adaptive capacity and coping capacity.

Coping capacity is the means by which people or organisations can use available resources and abilities to face a hazard that could lead to a disaster. 

For example, if a community has high levels of economic capital, plenty of emergency services to use and good access to information, it has high coping capacity.

Adaptive capacity measures the arrangements and processes in place in the community to enable adjustment through learning, adaptation and transformation. For example, if a community has strong community engagement and governance, it has high adaptive capacity.

The coping capacity factors are:

• social character (the social and demographic characteristics of the community)
• economic capital (the economic characteristics of the community)
• emergency services (the presence and resourcing of emergency services)
• planning and the built environment (the presence of legislation, plans, structures or codes to protect communities and their built environment)
• community capital (the cohesion and connectedness of the community)
• information access (the potential for communities to engage with natural hazard information).

The adaptive capacity factors are:

• social and community engagement (the capacity within communities to adaptively learn and transform in the face of complex change)
• governance  and leadership (the capacity within organisations to adaptively learn, review and adjust policies and procedures, or to transform organisational practices).

Dr Parsons and her team have assessed these factors in each community and combined them to determine whether each community has high, moderate or low coping or adaptive capacity for resilience.

Applying an understanding of disaster resilience

Not all Australian communities have the same capacity for resilience given the many social, economic and institutional factors that play a role. In fact, not even all communities within one larea have the same level of resilience. 

This cross-community mosaic of resilience within larger areas can be used to identify strengths, form alliances and develop targeted improvements.

For example, if you use the Index to look at the overall resilience of the greater Perth area, you will see a range of resilience capacities.

This means that it is not one-size-fits-all for areas such as Perth. Understanding the differences between communities within your area will help you understand where, specifically, to invest more resources and resilience-building initiatives.

Five Australian disaster resilience profiles

"What works in one place won’t necessarily work somewhere else,” Dr Parsons said, explaining that the improvements to resilience will look very different in different communities. 

To explore this, the Index also proposes five disaster resilience profiles in Australia—nationwide collections of communities that all fit a similar profile of resilience strengths and constraints. These profiles provide an opportunity to address specific constraints and strengths of an area.

For example, areas in western Queensland, north-western New South Wales, South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia all share a similar resilience profile.

“In some places, the capacity for disaster resilience comes from social strengths,” Dr Parsons said. “These same places can also have constraints on disaster resilience because of a lack of access to government services or telecommunications, and low economic capital. In another place, the capacity for disaster resilience might come from the provision of emergency services or local and regional planning. But these places also face limitations from lower community connectedness.”

Once you can identify areas similar to where you live, you can start looking at what those areas have done to improve their resilience, and assessing whether a similar approach will work for your community.

This also allows the opportunity for an open dialogue with other resilience partners, and the coordination of resilience-building initiatives and sharing of resources between local government areas.

The future of disaster resilience

The Index sets a new benchmark for measuring future changes in resilience to natural hazards and promoting resilience-building initiatives. By informing and supporting leaders in Australian organisations to better understand and assess resilience, those organisations will be able to improve how they support communities before, during and after a natural hazard, thereby building a more disaster-resilient country. 

While the Index can be specifically applied to fire and emergency services, it will also be of great value for business and industry, not-for-profit organisations, and local, state and federal governments. It will be used to inform policy, resource planning, community profiling, strategic planning, emergency planning and preparedness, risk assessment and other crucial processes.

Ms Flint emphasised the importance of the Index for the emergency management sector.

“The ability to identify hotspots of high or low disaster resilience in Australia, and identify areas of strength in coping and adaptive capacity […] will help not only to embed disaster resilience into policy and legislation, but also to lead to an increase in shared responsibility and resilience across Australia,” she said.

Explore the Australian Disaster Resilience Index at adri.bnhcrc.com.au