• Williams, Rachel
• Oconnell, Deborah
• Wise, Russ
• Meyers, Jacqui
• Meharg, Seona
• Edwards, Jill
• Osuchowski, Monica
• Crosweller, Mark

Abstract

The Australian Vulnerability Profile is an initiative of Emergency Management Australia. This report documents the research conducted in the project ‘Supporting the Development of the Australian Vulnerability Profile’. CSIRO was commissioned by Emergency Management Australia to conduct this Project, in collaboration with a broader team including Emergency Management Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, the Department of Defence, and the Department of the Environment and Energy. Workshops were hosted by South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia and Northern Territory. The Project explored the following research questions, the first two of which are relevant for the Australian Vulnerability Profile, and all three for the Project: Question 1: What do we value, and what do we stand to lose in disaster? Question 2: What makes Australia vulnerable to catastrophic disaster?Question 3: Has the Project been an effective intervention in helping to shift the narrative, build capacity and networks, change practice and institutions? The Project was comprised of the following components: • Designing for impact – a co-production approach. This comprised a number of activities including: o Theory of Change – hypothesising how and why desired changes to the emergency management and disaster resilience system might work o Stakeholder Engagement – the project uses a co-design approach and is deeply embedded in co-design with a range of stakeholders o Tracking Systemic Change – understanding and testing whether the desired changes to the system have been achieved. Partial results from the workshops are provided, and the full results will be published in future when the monitoring and evaluation work is complete. • ‘Disaster deconstruction’ workshops – designed to engage a range of stakeholders to elicit values (or the sets of things or values important to Australian communities and individuals), understandings of how the system works, particularly the social processes and choices creating vulnerability to disasters, and narratives. • Detailed analysis. The outputs of the Disaster Deconstruction workshops were combined with information from the literature and from a range of experts, to produce: o A values framework for guiding the elicitation and assessment of what’s important to people, what’s at threat in times of disaster, and the unavoidable trade-offs being made between valueso Typical system patterns – diagrams and their narratives about various dynamics of a social-ecological system relevant to understanding the root causes and impacts of disasters. • Synthesis and integration. An evidence-based narrative logic based on the results of the other components to inform or underpin a range of specific narratives and perspectives of the causes and consequences of vulnerability and disaster, for use by various stakeholders to communicate and engage with different audiences.The basic premise is that natural hazards only lead to disasters if they intersect with a society which is exposed and vulnerable. Disasters are increasingly exceeding the capacity of society to respond and recover – making it necessary to invest more (or smarter) on disaster risk mitigation. Mitigating the risks of disasters requires understanding the direct and indirect (systemic) causes and effects of vulnerability to inform where and how to intervene.The logic of the results is shown in the diagram below.Exploring how values affect vulnerability is important to understand. People hold different values and prioritise different things in different contexts, and these values are sometimes in tension [A, B].Societal decisions affecting vulnerability are the result of multiple, cumulative, non-linear processes by which tensions and trade-offs in different values and knowledge types are managed. Cumulative choices about values, rules and knowledge affect vulnerability [D]. A set of twelve typical system patterns emerged from the analysis.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• theory