Resilient Ready has successfully secured funding for our Creating a Social Capital and Social Infrastructure Measurement Framework to benefit every Australian project from the second round of the Disaster Ready Fund (DRF) allocations announced by NEMA.
The DRF is the Australian Government’s flagship initiative for disaster resilience and risk reduction, and supports projects that address the physical and social impacts of disasters on our communities. This is wonderful recognition of our work to date, and a vote of confidence in our approach to building resilience in communities across Australia.
We’re expanding on our South Australian ‘snapshot’ project, including every state in Australia, to create a national definition and measurement criteria for people connections and places where people connect and pilot Professor Daniel Aldrich’s social capital and social infrastructure heat-mapping data sets.
At Resilient Ready, we believe the missing piece of the resilience puzzle is people – people connections, and places people connect. And that’s why a Social Capital and Social Infrastructure Measurement Framework is so critical.
Right now in Australia, we don’t have a universal definition for or measurement of social capital (people connections) or social infrastructure (places where people connect).
As a result, we can’t correlate communities at risk of disaster with their level of social capital or quantity and quality of social infrastructure.
In the Australian Government’s Second National Action Plan – which aims to reduce systemic disaster risk in order to create stronger, more secure and resilient communities before during and after disasters – the need to “strengthen risk-informed decision-making across all systems to address disaster risk and deliver co-benefits” is specifically called out.
We must define what social capital and social infrastructure is to all Australians and enable relevant data to be embedded into the systemic risk approach.
Through our ‘snapshot’ project, South Australia has already taken a leadership role in understanding how people connections and places people connect can build resilience.
We have been looking at what Professor Daniel Aldrich’s social capital and social infrastructure heatmapping datasets can bring to South Australia, in an approach that can demonstrate the benefits of this type of measurement.
It’s an exciting time to be working in the disaster space as we explore how we can introduce, support and drive fresh approaches to preparedness and resilience that empower and strengthen communities everywhere.
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