Act on Climate facilitated a community resilience mapping session as part of North East Neighbourhood House Network's (NENHN) emergency management workshop at Mernda Uniting Church Hall in October 2024.
The activity once again showed how the knowledge is in the community and this session in particular highlighted how networking with neighbouring communities and working with other council areas is essential.
Climate impacts don't stay within boundary lines drawn on maps and the closest refuge or easiest route to safety for you may be in a neighbouring community. We can also learn from or expand excellent adaptation initiatives being implemented just one town over.
Good climate resilience strategies that keep community members safe - this is the outcome of Community Resilience Mapping. The activity aids the exploration and understanding of a specific area's risk to climate impacts. It identifies the residents most at risk, where a community's has strong climate resilience, and where the gaps are in its climate impact readiness.
We're offering support to anyone who wants to facilitate the activity in their own community. Check out our Community Resilience Mapping Facilitation Guide, which you can use to guide the running of your own event!
Read on for more about the community resilience mapping we did at NENHN's emergency management workshop and its outcomes.
Having appropriate and relevant climate resilience initiatives are key to keeping communities safe. Community resilience mapping helps communities to understand their unique challenges and strengths, and which climate impacts they’re most at risk from, so that they can implement appropriate solutions. It identifies the residents most at risk, where a community has strong climate resilience, and where the gaps are in its climate impact readiness.
We're offering support to anyone who wants to facilitate the activity in their own community. Check out our Community Resilience Mapping Facilitation Guide, which you can use to guide the running of your own event!
Community Resilience Mapping is used to achieve good climate resilience, through community members brainstorming strategies that keep community members safe. The session:
- Helps inform adaptation and emergency response plans & the prioritisation of time and resources
- Results in practical community-led solutions & knowledge of how can stay safe
Through identifying:
- Exposures: various climate impacts
- Sensitivities: who/which areas most at risk
- Assets: what already in place to reduce impacts
- Adaptive Capacity: where are the gaps
This activity was adapted from the Climate Resilience Project.
Read more on what community resilience mapping is and why to do it.
Community Resilience Mapping at NENHN's emergency management workshop
The Act on Climate collective facilitated a community resilience mapping activity for North East Neighbourhood House Network (NENHN) on 31 October 2024 at its Emergency Management Planing for Neighbourhood Houses workshop at Mernda Uniting Church Hall. The workshop was attended by Neighbourhood House staff from Whittlesea, St Andrews, Banyule, Darebin and Mernda.
The community resilience mapping done with the North East Neighbourhood House Network (NENHN) highlighted the various risks that were relevant for each of the communities present, and while the risks varied, there were similarities between communities, and they realised that they could work together to share information to all better adapt to climate impacts.
One of the most important aspects of community-led climate adaptation is collaboration and sharing of knowledge. While climate impacts are localised and need local-led solutions, there are also opportunities to share information and resources, so that we can learn from one another what works and what doesn’t.
The communities identified increasing development properties with no regulation around climate resilience materials and planning, lack of communication between councils and a lack of knowledge in the communities as contributing to their climate risks. They identified that increased communication and education between people and communities can be an asset to coordinating better climate resilience strategies. Climate resilience strategies that were suggested ranged from small strategies to improve the resiliency of the various neighbourhood houses, to community-wide education campaigns.
Identified Exposures:
The exposures that the communities brought up were the following:
- Fire
- Floods
- Storms
- Heatwaves
- Power loss
Community members also identified the context of their towns that increased their risk to these exposures such as:
- Black roofs increasing heat
- Gardens/grass that is not maintained that can increase fire risk
- Loss of established trees due to the East Link and other developments
- Poor soil quality to support new saplings
- One way roads/narrow roads and locked gates causing challenges for emergency response and evacuation
- Trees not being maintained and posing a risk to power lines
- Supermarkets and other perceived ‘cooling centres’ not providing adequate cooling for the community
Identified Sensitivities:
People
- Gender inequality - women have the burden of care for others and don’t look after their health first
- People who don’t trust the government / avoidant of authorities
- People that suffer from Asbestos poisoning or Asthma
- Older people
- People who are isolated
- People in a lower socioeconomic status
- First Nations people
- Victims of family violence
Infrastructure
- Mobile towers losing power
- Landline users losing access to service because the infrastructure isn’t being maintained
- Public transport being cancelled
- Loss of power means losing access to technology which is how people stay up to date in emergencies
Education
- People that have recently moved from the inner city and don’t have an understanding of the unique climate risks
- Multicultural communities that have been excluded from education opportunities around climate impacts
Identified Assets
- Women have knowledge on where people are and are connected to the community
- Local people who have been there for a long time see how things change and know how to react to disasters
- People in the communities are happy to share knowledge with one another
- Community centres being a point of contact
Adaptive Capacity:
These are the gaps that were identified and the potential solutions to address them.
Lack of education
The communities identified that there is a lack of education to people who are newer to the area, and also to people from multicultural communities. They identified that doing outreach to these groups can improve the adaptive capacity of their communities. This could be done through community forums, flyering in neighbourhoods and talking to community members about the reality that we can’t wait for the government and need to look out for one another.
Communication and collaboration
Community members also noted that there is a lack of adequate communication between councils, neighbourhood houses and other community groups. They suggested to focus less on arbitrary boundaries and to share strategies between communities. The NENHN suggested setting up an alliance so that they can support one another with their adaptive strategies.
Relationships
Isolation was another gap that was identified, and it was suggested that mapping networks, creating phone trees, and increasing community building activities can improve community connectedness so that people can look out for each other.
Technology
The digital divide is a big gap for community members that don’t understand how to use technology as that is how most emergency information is distributed. It was suggested to increase knowledge around how to use technology to stay up to date with emergency response information, but also to find alternative ways of disseminating that information.
Infrastructure
The vulnerability of infrastructure is a big gap in these communities. Some suggested solutions to adapt to power outages were satellite phones , fitting neighbourhood houses with solar panels so that they can remain refuges during power outages, and getting a backup power source for mobile towers.
Transport
Public transport shutting down in emergencies is a big gap for those that don’t have alternative transport methods. The neighbourhood house staff suggested setting up their own alternative shuttle bus transport services when this happens to be able to help community members that would otherwise be isolated.
Government policies
The policy of needing to ‘build back the same’ is a massive gap in community resilience to climate impacts, as better technology and adaptive materials are available for most infrastructure now. It was suggested that changing policy to allow people to ‘build back better’ would improve adaptive capacity. Additionally, adding in requirements for new development planning is needed so that they take into account climate impacts and adaptation.
What Next?
The NENHN is going to form its own working group/alliance so that it can continue to collaborate on climate adaptation initiatives in its various communities, and help one another advocate to their respective councils for more support.
Want help making this happen in your community?
We're offering support to anyone who wants to facilitate the activity in their own community. Check out our Community Resilience Mapping Facilitation Guide, which you can use to guide the running of your own event!
Uncertain about running a Community Resilience Mapping session in your community? We're happy to help! Contact us, either Aleesha Hanczakowski on [email protected] or Vicky Ellmore on [email protected], and we can answer any questions and walk you through running the event yourself, or we can come facilitate it ourselves, if possible.
Reach out for support to run Community Resilience Mapping in your community!
Stay tuned for further updates from Friends of the Earth's Act on Climate collective as we campaign for community-led climate adaptation by signing up for campaign updates here.
If you haven't already, please add your name to the call for a Victorian Community Climate Adaptation Fund. We need community-led climate adaptation that is continuously and adequately funded. This funding will enable communities to fulfil their plans to build resilient communities in a changing climate and keep those most at risk safe.