The social, economic, and environmental costs of natural disasters is rapidly rising; and while everyone has a role in responding to hazards, local citizens are provided with limited practical support to truly build their resilience. This project will redress the current lack of pragmatic strategies to help coastal communities prepare for, and respond to, climate hazards. By exploring how at-risk Australian coastal communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from coastal climate hazards within the context of broader socio-ecological change, this project will address critical knowledge gaps to better understand what enables or constrains civil society action, and provide policy direction for interventions to build community resilience effectively and efficiently.
The aim is to build civil society’s climate resilience by investigating how individuals, families and neighborhoods respond to coastal climate hazards with the goal of harnessing and building their adaptive capacity. The proposed research builds on well-cited and policy-adopted scholarship linking local scale action with innovative strategies to build capacity in coastal communities (e.g., Elrick-Barr et al 2016, 2017, 2022). The project will:
- Explore how local scale connection in neighborhoods vulnerable to coastal climate hazards facilitates access to, and mobilization of, capacity.
- Critically analyze and demonstrate how connection and capacity change in response to socio-ecological change, and the impacts of these factors on local scale preparation, response and recovery.
- Identify leverage points to build community resilience to coastal climate hazards that optimize and guide government interventions.
Key benefits of the study include: (i) achieving Australia’s national resilience goal of empowering communities, and reducing the significant social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate hazards; and (ii) generating new knowledge to address UN Sustainable Development Goal 13, target 13.1 Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters; and Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
The project is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects Funding Scheme (Project DE240100611).
Main Contact:
Dr Carmen Elrick-Barr, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, [email protected].
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