Tracking and Enhancing Resilience in Rural Communities
How can rural communities track resilience and adapt to changing conditions?
The problem:
Extreme climate events like droughts, bushfires, and floods are now regular challenges for rural communities. Building resilience—the capacity to prepare, respond, recover, and adapt— is vital for long-term sustainability, but requires understanding what drives it and how it changes over time.
Our research:
- Funded by the Southern New South Wales Innovation Hub, our research partnered with rural communities to identify simple, reliable indicators of resilience.
- We translated these into a set of tools that communities can use to monitor and respond to resilience challenges.
- We created the Early Insights for More Resilient Communities dashboard, offering clear and accessible explanations to support local action.
Our impact:
- Since its launch in mid-2024, the Early Insights dashboard has reached thousands of users in New South Wales, supporting workshops and discussions that help stakeholders engage more effectively with resilience data.
- Evaluations show strong support (8.7/10), with users praising the dashboard as a valuable community resource; work is now underway to expand it nationally and broaden the range of indicators.
We worked with rural communities in southern New South Wales to identify easy to monitor indicators to rapidly determine when local resilience is changing.
| Our Researchers | Our Collaborators | Publication |
|---|---|---|
| Charles Sturt University Australian National University University of Wollongong A network of community organisations working to build resilience in their local communities across southern NSW | Brown, K., Amorsen, G., Schirmer, J., Amirghasemi, M. Bewong, M., Ip, H.L., Islam, Z., Kamal, S., Merrit, W., Moore, A.R., Rahman, A., Stosic, D., Sultana, N., van Kerkhoff, L., Wang, L., Zare, F., and Zheng, L. (2024) Southern NSW Innovation Hub. |