Community Resilience in an Uncertain Future: The Role of Australian Emergency Managers
Channel: Tom Lowe
Date: 2011-02-25

In June 2010 Tom Lowe, a senior social research officer with the Department of Sustainability and the Environment in Victoria, Australia, was awarded a research scholarship by the Australian Emergency Services Foundation (www.esf.com.au). 

The research proposed to identify the practical steps that Emergency Service Organisations (ESOs) in Australia can take in helping communities prepare for and adapt to natural hazards such as bushfire, flood or storm events.

By interviewing practitioners from the Victorian emergency services and academics with expertise in the fields of climate change and human adaptation to change in the UK, the research was able to identify a suite of approaches that could be practicably delivered by ESOs.

The research concluded that ESOs themselves cannot create community 'resilience'; this is already inherent within communities. Instead, they can play an important role in creating platforms and environments in which community members can learn from each other and, with the appropriate kinds of agency support, identify the pathways that will be most effective in adapting to disruption and change.

In an effort to ensure uptake and understanding of these concepts by emergency service practitioners, Tom chose to communicate the outcomes through a documentary. This learning aid is aimed at emergency managers and is intended to stimulate thinking around the kinds of community engagement programmes and approaches that would be most effective and deliverable amongst the many competing and often divergent emergency management objectives.

The full-length (40 minute) version can be viewed by following this link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9riCb1L0m4o)  and the DVD can obtained by contacting Tom Lowe on t.lowe@hotmail.com.