The behaviour of natural hazards is changing, and as concurrent and cascading disasters become more common, researchers are working to better understand the impacts on communities and how organisations can best provide support.
Building on the award-winning Recovery Capitals project funded by previous iterations of Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre), researchers from the Recovery Capitals – Integration project are exploring the mental health and wellbeing impacts of natural hazards through data on the social disruption caused by one or more emergencies over time.
The project will make quantitative data tracking communities’ mental health and wellbeing over place and time available to help recovery and resilience organisations to guide decision making about recovery services.
Providing this information on a consistently updated public platform will be a valuable resource for organisations and agencies.
The project involves researchers from The University of Melbourne, Deakin University and Phoenix Australia and is supported by the Australian Red Cross.
Project lead researcher Professor Lisa Gibbs from the University of Melbourne said that the original Recovery Capitals project aims to support wellbeing after disasters by providing evidence-based guidance to those involved in recovery.
“We wanted to make sure it would be useful and easy to use for anyone involved in pre- or post-disaster recovery planning. Given the complexity and diversity of disaster contexts, the guide deliberately doesn’t include a precise recovery ‘checklist’ of actions. Instead, it provides short summaries of evidence and prompts for discussion about how this knowledge might apply locally,” she said.
The original Community Capitals framework includes seven capitals that can be drawn upon: natural, social, financial, cultural, political, built and human.
“The disaster context is changing. Instead of dealing with single major disasters, communities are increasingly facing multiple disasters, with repeat or new hazards occurring before communities have had a chance to recover from the previous one,” Professor Gibbs said.
To analyse this, the research team is gathering data to feed into a resource called the Community Disaster Context Matrix.
“Rather than try to support recovery from each hazard separately, the Community Disaster Context Matrix allows us to assess the level of social disruption the community is currently experiencing and their capacity to deal with that disruption based on their Recovery Capitals profile,” Professor Gibbs said.
“The assessment of both social disruption and the Recovery Capitals profile requires a combination of quantitative data which is captured from various existing sources and qualitative data that provides essential insights about the local context,” she said.
Project end-user Bridget Tehan from Australian Red Cross said she is excited about this project because it builds on what communities and practitioners value in the original project.
“By creating an accessible online platform and providing consistent, granular data, the project will help us better understand what communities are experiencing, and what support they say they need,” Ms Tehan said.
“This means Red Cross and other partners can tailor our efforts in ways that more meaningfully reflect people’s realities and strengthen local resilience,” she said.
Professor Gibbs said she hopes these resources will increase understanding that disasters can have long term impacts on every aspect of our lives, but that “we can also offset those impacts to cope with major disruptions by building on our unique combinations of strengths and resources”.
“In doing so, I am hopeful that they will increase recovery workforce capacity and community disaster resilience across Australia.”
Visit the Recovery Capitals – Integration project page for more information.