The state of disaster resilience in Australia 2025

The Australian Disaster Resilience Index (ADRI) is a nationally standardised index of Australian communities’ capacity for disaster resilience. Disaster resilience is a protective characteristic that acts to reduce the effects of, and losses from, natural hazards. ADRI is not about the resilience of individuals, but assesses disaster resilience as a system of social, economic and institutional factors.

Released in 2020, ADRI helps users understand how systemic capacity for disaster resilience differs from place to place and supports communities, governments at all levels and industry in planning, policy development, risk analysis and decision making.

In 2024, the opportunity arose to refresh ADRI. This report assesses the state of disaster resilience in Australia using this next iteration, referred to as ADRI-2. The foundational design and statistical methods of ADRI-1 are retained in ADRI-2. No major changes were made to the conceptual construct, structural design, datasets or statistical computation of ADRI so that ADRI-2 is methodologically compatible with ADRI-1.

The Index was computed in 2,330 SA2s (Statistical Areas Level 2 of the Australian Bureau of Statistics), across Australia.