Research highlights
In its current strategy, Impact 2030, Monash dedicates itself to addressing three major global challenges: Geopolitical Security, Thriving Communities and Climate Change. Fire to Flourish sits at the nexus of the last two of these challenges.
Fire to Flourish is primarily concerned with supporting four partner communities in New South Wales and Victoria to recover from the devastating 2019-2020 bushfire season. The ultimate aim is to foster thriving communities that are resilient to future disaster.
This focus on our partner communities means that research is a relatively small proportion of our activity. But it is by no means an afterthought. Indeed, it occupies a central position in our work, enabling us to build an evidence base in fields that will support communities across Australia and the world to strengthen their resilience in the face of climate-change-related disaster.
What we’re trying to find out
Fire to Flourish’s research is inherently transdisciplinary. At the heart of our research program, we are looking to understand how to enable communities to strengthen their resilience to disaster, with a focus on developing and testing new methods, tools and processes to support community-led resilience building.
Areas of research include:
- Community resilience
- Connections and capabilities: exploring how community led, co-design practices change or strengthen the ways people’s networks and their skills and capabilities grow and develop over time.
- System change
- Holistic disaster resilience, including:
- Economic wellbeing
- Natural environment
- Built environment
- Health & wellbeing
- National indigenous disaster resilience
- Participatory granting
- Developmental evaluation and learning
Within these research areas, we have several large projects, including:
System change workshops and report
In August 2022, Fire to Flourish released the Transformative Actions for Community-Led Disaster Resilience report. This report proposes six transformative actions for putting community-led disaster resilience into practice and strengthening Australian communities in the face of climate change.
The National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Project
The project seeks to listen to, and learn from, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities about their experiences in disasters, how disasters affect them in ways that are different to others, and what changes need to be made to better support communities to prepare for, and respond to, disasters.
Internally displaced persons project
The 2019–20 bushfires destroyed more than 3,100 homes, with an estimated 8,100 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Despite our highly measured world, there is no known process for recording IDPs in the aftermath of bushfires in Australia.
In April, Monash University Disaster Resilience Initiative and Fire to Flourish were awarded a National Recovery and Resilience Agency (NRRA, now NEMA) grant to explore this critical gap.
Resilient lifelines project
Lifelines are the critical infrastructure and essential services on which all communities depend – water, schools, telecommunications networks etc.
Fire to Flourish is partnering with RMIT University, the Australian Centre for Disaster Resilience and Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA) to strengthen lifeline resilience in Australia by developing a conceptual framework and associated research agenda that progress knowledge of the issue across sectors and disciplines.