Resilience Building in Action
Resilient Communities Framework
A practitioner's guide to understanding and building disaster resilience at a community level
Across the globe, climate hazards - whether wildfires, floods, or rising sea levels - are becoming increasingly frequent and catastrophic. Global megatrends such as rapid urbanization, economic shifts and geo-political conflict further contribute to disruption and transformation of our communities.
In Australia, the Black Summer in 2019-2020 fires burned over 24 million hectares, while extreme flooding devastated communities. The city of Brisbane alone received 792 millimeters of rain in just three days. Communities and governments are realizing that we cannot afford to be unprepared for fire, floods and other disasters. Response agencies are unable to protect everyone, and the social, cultural, health, economic, built and natural losses are both immediate and last for generations.
In the aftermath of the devastating Black Summer fires, the Minderoo Foundation developed its Fire and Flood Resilience initiative — and committed AU$70 million to response, recovery and long-term resilience building across the country. In 2021, Resilient Cities Catalyst partnered with the Foundation’s Resilient Communities Team to develop the Resilient Communities Framework —a guide to support the initiative’s resilience-building efforts across Australian communities and beyond.
The Resilient Communities Framework provides a comprehensive understanding of resilience, and includes simple tools for resilience practitioners, community leaders, policymakers, and funders to identify and prioritize actions to build resilience. It adds to the rich body of resilience literature by proposing that how a project is planned and implemented is equally important to building resilience as what actions and outcomes a community drives forward. It is designed to be a practical guide, accessible by rural and urban practitioners across disciplines. In partnership with Minderoo, the RCC team was responsible for developing the Framework and its accompanying tools; leading collaborative feedback and training sessions with an Advisory Group of community experts and program delivery partners; and capturing lessons to inform future Framework iterations and tools.
Today the Framework is guiding Minderoo’s Fire and Flood Resilience programming in 50 Australian communities, including community engagement strategies and project implementation. It is also informing the Foundation’s approach to reducing the impact of bushfires and halving hazard exposure in Australia’s most fire and flood-prone regions through their Fire Shield and Healthy Landscapes missions. Given Minderoo’s deep value of cross-sectoral collaboration, the Foundation is exploring whether the Framework could help to align efforts across national and state agencies, NGOs and funders, all driven to improve outcomes for Australia’s most vulnerable residents.
See above for the full Framework and the Brief.