Community Resilience

Community engagement is an essential ingredient in developing community resilience. It ensures that our communities feel empowered and confident that they can deal with emergency situations.

The very nature of emergency services demands that we actively engage with communities - listening to what they have to tell us and using their feedback to continuously improve our own processes.

Community engagement is also about ensuring that communities understand their risks and ways of mitigating these risks - enabling them to be prepared in times of an emergency.

Many communities are susceptible to natural hazard consequences. While the consequences themselves cannot be prevented, their implications for the rate of recovery within the community are influenced by the preparedness of the community and its capacity to mitigate and/or adapt to disruptive consequences (its resilience).

Emergency management has recognised the power of this resilience within a community and this has driven the momentum for change from a response-based approach to a risk management focus.

The implications of this change in approach to emergency management significantly impacts in the way we do business with regards to risk communication, hazard mitigation, community development and community sustainability.

We will be working with communities to identify how individuals, community and societal/environmental factors can be integrated to constitute a model of adaptive capacity (resilience) based on community engagement.

In engaging with the community we are also mindful of and respect the diversity of cultures in the communities of South Australia. We will target our community engagement interactions in culturally appropriate ways so that we can ensure that the emergency service sectors' messages are spread across the state.

Useful links providing further information on Community Resilience are below:

Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters (HFA)
Community Resilience UK: Supporting the public in an emergency 
Increasing community resilience to bushfire - implications from a north Queensland community case study
Community Resilience Manual A resource for rural recovery and renewal (Canada). 
Improving Community Resilience to extreme weather events
Community Resilience: Integrating Hazard Management and Community Engagement
Promoting Community Resilience In Disasters: The role for schools, youth, and families