The Australian natural disaster resilience index

The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Indexis a tool for assessing the resilience of communities to natural hazards at a large scale. It is designed specifically to assess resilience to natural hazards – not derived for another purpose then modified to suit a resilience focus. The assessment inputs in several ways to macro-level policy, strategic planning, community planning and community engagement activities at National, State and local government levels.

First, it is a snapshot of the current state of natural hazard resilience at a national scale. Second, it is a layer of information for use in strategic policy development and planning. Third, it provides a benchmark against which to assess future change in resilience to natural hazards. Understanding resilience strengths and weaknesses will help communities, governments and organizations to build the capacities needed for living with natural hazards. 

The document outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the approach of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Coordination Research Centre and the University of New England. It then explains what factors about resilience it will assess using data aligned to the proposed resilience philosophy. Lastly, this document briefly explains how the data and the indicators that will be collected to form the index, will be used.

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