Act on Climate facilitated a community resilience mapping session hosted by the Whittlesea Climate Action Network (WCAN) at the start of this month. The session was invigorating, with many great actionable ideas coming up, and passion from those in the room to start working on them. 

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.

Read on for more about the community resilience mapping session with WCAN and it's outcomes.

Act on Climate facilitated a community resilience mapping session hosted by Whittlesea Climate Action Network (WCAN) in Mernda on the 10th of May. The workshop was attended by WCAN members, a youth group and other community members.  

The session highlighted that there are many exposures for the communities, and that they currently have a lot of gaps, but also a lot of potential for solutions. The session started by brainstorming the main exposures as a large group. Once those exposures were identified, participants were put into groups based on each climate impact to focus on sensitivities, assets and adaptive capacity for the specific climate impact. 

Identified Exposures:

The main exposures that the communities brought up were the following: 

• Water management (Flooding / disrupted water flow and lack of rain / drought)
• Biodiversity loss
• Heat / heat island effect
• Food security

Other exposures identified were:

• Mental health impacts 
• Bushfires
• Unpredictable weather and intense temperature changes 
• Climate Migration

Participants split up into groups based on the exposure/climate impact they were most interested and focused on sensitivities, assets and gaps for that specific climate impact 

Food security

Identified Assets

The group identified that the adaptive strengths for food security in their community are: 

• strong community connections via food banks, community organisations and community lunches and faith-based groups
• Farmers market
• Supermarkets have a Corporate Social Responsibility to give food and support organisations
• Ability to grow food because of larger plots 
• Community education and school gardening programs
• Organic waste management 
• Emergency relief network 

Identified Sensitivities

The group identified who and what will be most at risk in regards to food security: 

• Wildlife, plants and pets and farm animals
• People in a lower socioeconomic status 
• Farmers
• First Nations knowledge and cultural practices
• Water supply
• Soil health
• Traditional knowledge of food production
• People from Culturally And Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds

Adaptive Capacity

The group identified that there were several gaps in information on where to get help, and about alternative food sources. They noted that the focus on emergency relief meant that longer-term sustainable solutions were often overlooked. 

The proposed solutions the group came up with were focused on creating opportunities for people to connect and learn more about food: 

• Create a map/directory on existing initiatives to encourage collaboration
• Encourage volunteering and creation of gardens (organic)
• Seed libraries
• Farmers Cooperative Banks 
• Self-help groups (micro-economics)
• Education in Schools
  • Gardening
  • Food production
  • Farms
• Events on topic to connect/educate

Other solutions suggested by the group include: 

• Working on habitat protection
• Better connection to council projects
• Better urban design planning

Water management

Identified Assets

The group identified various assets around climate adaptation in their community including:

• That organisational administration exists (e.g. Melbourne Water, DWELP<, SES and Emergency response teams)
• There's environmental capital - (natural & constructed)
• Community have access to information & research capacity
• Policy formation is an option  EG: "Whittlesea 2040"
• Civil society is active EG: Citizen Science
• Current planting programs
• Collective knowledge of First Australians Collectives 

Identified Sensitivities

The areas and people most at risk of flooding impacts were: 

• Neighbourhoods that have problems with drainage or new housing developments
• Farmers
• Emergency workers
• People with disabilities
• The elderly
• Lower income households
• Homeless people 
• Areas built on floodplains

The group also identified that a rise in salt due to flooding decreases food production, linking two different climate impacts together. 

Adaptive Capacity

The group identified various gaps including:

• The hard infrastructure is unsuitable 
• Knowledge base is incomplete 
• Inequality in information dissemination

The proposed solutions to address the gaps include:

• Promote community engagement and foster community outreach
• Encourage better corporate governance
• Improve the quality of the planning interface
• Environmentally, sustainably aligned engineering solutions 
• Address systemic issues
• Create place-based working groups  (think globally, act locally)
• Pressure decision makers for improved outcomes 

Heat

Identified Assets

The group identified quite a few creative assets that can help the community to adapt to heat impacts, including:

• The CFA and planned burn-offs
• Council projects such as heat preparedness, land management, tree canopy and provision of fans
• Community education on how to keep cool in various languages
• Youth groups such as scouts
• Cool spaces in the community that have air conditioning via the Cool Spaces Project
• Education in school around sun safety

Identified Sensitivities

The group identified who would be most at risk regarding heat: 

• Older people and people with disabilities - especially those that require life support in the case of power outages
• Babies and children, as well as pets - especially if left in the car
• Outdoor and emergency workers
• People escaping from family violence
• Farmers whose livelihoods might be at risk
• Native flora and fauna
• Socially isolated people
• People from CALD backgrounds
• Incarcerated people in custody 
• People with cognitive disabilities or neurodiversity that may not be able to easily access information on heat 

Adaptive Capacity

The group noted that the gaps include a lack of information for CALD communities, that wealthy people are mostly protected, but others are not, and that a lack of social responsibility has isolated people. They brainstormed various potential solutions to heat impacts, including: 

• Building social networks for isolated people through informal social network such as friends & neighbors - checking in, easy & tangible
• Provide information to CALD communities from community leaders to other members of their community - in their language and in culturally appropriate ways. 
• Co-design solutions with various diverse communities 
• Remove barriers to accessing information by adding the information into people's routines (e.g. at the end of a Mosque service do a PSA that the Mosque is available as a cool refuge, or share information on who has air conditioning that people can use) 
• Install more water fountains and make more public cool spaces
• Plant more trees and increase green spaces

Biodiversity Loss

Identified Assets

The group identified that there are a lot of adaptive strengths in the community such as: 

• Passionate community led action through various groups (e.g. WCAN, Nugal Biik, Friends of Plenty Gorge, the Melbourne Arboretum etc)
• Strong understanding of the history and heritage of the area
• Citizen science
• Research and studies, and libraries share this information

Identified Sensitivities

The group identified various people and things most at risk regarding biodiversity loss:

• Food security and therefore people's lives
• Farmers and people working in agricultural jobs
• Conservationists 
• Physical and mental health
• Animal, plant, fungi microbe and insect kingdoms
• Indigenous plants, lore, knowledge and stories 

Adaptive Capacity

There are various gaps in adapting to biodiversity loss including:

• Knowledge & awareness of biodiversity and the effects of losing this 
• A lack of good data 
• Protections & longer-term planning
• Good news stories
• Technology

The group identified various potential solutions to these gaps including: 

• Setting up a social enterprise
• Educate parents and children in local schools
• Hold Community Engagement around planning to increase biodiversit
• Use local groups to share information
• Encourage people to plant Indigenous gardens at home
• Community newspaper/ email lists/ social media to spread the message

There was great determination from the community members that participated in the session, to action some of these initiatives and work with the local government to increase work on and funding for adaptation projects. Communities have the knowledge and skills to improve their adaptive capacity and keep everyone safe, they just need support and resources to enact them. That's why Act on Climate are calling for a Victorian Community Climate Adaptation Fund. Email your MP our report findings from last year's Resilience Inquiry to back up our ask for more funding for community-led climate adaptation.

What Next?

WCAN are planning on facilitating more Community Resilience Mapping sessions with other community members, so that a diversity of perspectives and knowledge can be represented. They are also potentially forming two working groups, one for a community battery initiave, and one within WCAN to keep working on adaptation and are focused on building their network. If you live within the City of Whittlesea and want to work on adaptation, you can sign up to become a member of WCAN here: https://forms.office.com/r/auKRsSQ5X6?origin=lprLink

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 India Rowles 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.