Disaster Resilience Initiative
Introduction
Over recent years, strengthening the resilience of communities to foreseen and unforeseen disasters, emergencies and disruptive events has become an integral part of Australia’s ability to prepare for, mitigate, respond to and recover from events that actually or potentially pose population-level threats to society, the national economy and environment.
Fire, drought, flood, storm, and the long-term impacts of extreme weather events present an ever-increasing challenge for all Australians. We recognise the rapidly growing need for preparing communities to help themselves before, during and after such events. We focus on preparing communities to strengthen their resilience through climate and disaster risk reduction to meet the vision, goals, priorities and principles of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework (2018).
We play a key role between Australian and international researchers, and community practitioners, to collectively strengthen capacity and resilience through high-quality research, education and community engagement. We aim to challenge and support communities, governments and organisations to strengthen their resilience against foreseen, unforeseen or disruptive events.
Applying the concept of resilience to climate and disaster risk reduction
The resilience concept applied to climate and disaster risk reduction inspires us to think about planning for, mitigating, responding to, and recovering from all types of disasters, emergencies or disruptions. Understanding the links between resilience and community in this setting, helps us focus on enhancing the elements of resilience during each of these phases to create stronger and more resilient communities. Such an achievement provides a way of helping to ensure that connected communities remain strong and resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, recover and thrive from expected or unexpected disruptive events.
The MUDRI Compendium
Since our inception, MUDRI’s strong interest in community resilience triggered the inspiration to create this Compendium of Victorian Community-based Resilience Building Case Studies, the first of its kind in Australia, to feature resilience-building case studies, shared learnings, insights, challenges and solutions in this context.
The MUDRI team created, improved and progressed this resource over a number of years. The initial idea for the Compendium was born out of a series of Annual MUDRI Forums that explored the national and political mandate to adopt coordinated, resilience-based approaches to emergency and disaster management guided by the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (2011). As a result, people presented case studies at the MUDRI Community Resilience-building Forums. We recognised the need to support communities to avoid duplication, preserve precious resources, and capture these learnings in a single collection. These all inspired the creation of the Compendium.
The Compendium enables communities to promote their resilience-building activities to other Victorians, with the creators of each case study encouraged to share their ideas, their journeys, and to explain how they overcame challenges and discovered unexpected findings. It also represents a comprehensive resource that encourages resilience-building activities to others and supports them in strengthening resilience within their own communities by providing examples and expertise.
Free access to the Compendium provides a resource for all people from across all sectors, council boundaries and community groups to deliver resilience-building projects that help Victorian communities become even more viable, sustainable, liveable and prosperous, today and long into the future.
MUDRI invites you to contribute your community-based resilience-building activity/ies to the Compendium, so together we can use shared experiences and learnings to strengthen community resilience across Victoria.
The Upper Beaconsfield Bushfire & Biodiversity Tool
This community-led, values-based bushfire risk mitigation project delivers a single point of tailored local information for residents living in Upper Beaconsfield, Guys Hill and Dewhurst.
The user-friendly tool visualises a community’s devastating bushfire history, reveals its residents’ values about living in a bushfire-prone area, and provides evidence-based actions to protect homes and properties from bushfire risks.
The tool is designed to empower residents in one of Australia’s most at-risk communities to acquire tailored information and make informed decisions about protecting biodiversity and managing bushfire fuels on private property.
This project engages a community of approximately 3000 residents to undertake risk assessment and management, and collaborate with agencies, local government, subject experts and academia to mitigate the effects of bushfires.
The Victorian State Government’s Safer Together program funded this community-led project with in-kind support from local government, land and fire agencies, academics, environment and fire experts.