The latest Australian Disaster Resilience Index: ‘State of Disaster Resilience Report’ was recently published by Natural Hazards Research Australia, under a partnership banner with the University of New England, and the Australian National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).
The ADRI is a tool that measures how well Australian communities can handle and bounce back from disasters. It looks at disaster resilience not in terms of individuals, but on a ‘whole of community’ basis. The focus is on assessing the ability to reduce the impact and losses from natural hazards, but not just on a local level. Rather, ADRI focuses on the bigger picture—how social, economic, and institutional factors work together to build resilience in communities.
Launched in 2020, the ADRI helps people understand how different areas of Australia vary in their ability to withstand disasters. It’s not just for communities, but also for governments and industries to use in planning, policy making, risk assessment, and decision-making processes; and is based on eight key themes:
Governance & leadership: examining the capacity of organisations to adaptively learn, review and adjust policies or transform agency practices.
Social character: representing the social and demographic factors influencing community ability to prepare and recover from a natural hazard event.
Economic capital: focusing on the economic factors linked to preparation and recovery.
Emergency services: dealing with the presence, capability and resourcing of first responder resources.
Planning & the built environment: representing application of mitigation, planning and risk management strategies.
Community capital: considering the cohesion and connectiveness of community.
Information access: detailing the potential for local communities to engage with natural hazard information resources.
Social & community engagement: considering the adaptive capacity of communities to both learn and transform in the face of complex change; and
