New guidance to help Australian communities be ‘summer resilient’
Researchers have developed a community energy resilience toolkit to make communities safer and stronger together ahead of the bushfire season.
How ready are Australian communities to respond to – and bounce back from – power outages caused by climate-related conditions like bushfires, extreme heat, floods and cyclones?
Already this year, we have experienced record-breaking heat and the start of a devastating bushfire season, and experts predict these extreme conditions to continue.
We know from past events such as the bushfires in Mallacoota and the Lismore floods that environmental disasters can cause power outages through damage to power lines and infrastructure, impacting people’s ability to communicate, cook and store food and more.
But communities can act now to be better prepared. The Energy Ready Toolkit is here to help make Australian communities more ‘summer resilient’.
The Energy Ready Toolkit is the result of a project aimed at building communities’ resilience and preparedness to meet essential energy needs when emergencies like bushfires or floods strike.
It was funded by Energy Consumers Australia and delivered in partnership with the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), the Community Power Agency and Parallel Lines.
The Energy Ready Toolkit empowers communities to achieve a high degree of energy resilience, helping them prepare for increasingly extreme weather events.
– Sarah Niklas, ISF
The toolkit contains materials for a series of activities communities can do to examine the risks they face, identify shared priorities and develop a plan of action that’s tailored to their unique needs and values.
ISF Senior Research Consultant Sarah Niklas says, “The Energy Ready Toolkit empowers communities to achieve a high degree of energy resilience, helping them prepare for increasingly extreme weather events.
The toolkit can be used to support collaboration and help community members work together to make the best use of their local assets, knowledge, connections, and capacity to achieve a higher state of energy resilience.”
By communities, for communities
The toolkit is the result of a year-long process of research and consultation. The Energy Ready team travelled around the east coast of Australia to consult with communities who had experienced extreme disasters and met with communities that are at risk of being impacted by climate-related disasters. This enabled the team to pass learnings from experienced communities to those likely to be hit in the future.
This information was collected at a series of workshops in Mullumbimby and Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, Gympie and Magnetic Island in Queensland, and Bonang and Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. It is a resource for community, by community.
The Energy Ready Toolkit is a first-of-its-kind resource and is available to download for free at: energyready.uts.edu.au
It’s important that people access and utilise this resource. It could prove vital for local councils and emergency authorities in creating more resilient Australian communities in the face of extreme weather events.
By working through the activities, communities will be better connected, stronger and safer with a robust energy-resilience plan.
Caroline Valente:
We're proud to fund this project through our grants program as a collaboration grant. This meant we had the opportunity to work alongside the project partners, the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, Community Power Agency, and Parallel Lines to bring this from an inspiring idea to a ground-breaking piece of work.
The Energy Ready project aims to gather lessons and best practices on community energy resilience. So, through extensive desktop research, deep community engagement, collaboration with experts in energy resilience and disaster response, plus a human-centered visual design approach, the project team was able to translate the findings into a one-of-a-kind resource for communities.
Sarah Niklas:
The definition of community energy resilience, which we proposed in the literature review, says that resilient communities are communities that utilise localised energy sources in order to prepare. So, that's to learn and to anticipate, to respond and withstand, and to recover from disasters. And so, they also include aspects of social connections and social learning. They include economic aspects related to affordability and accessibility. And of course, it includes renewable energy technologies and any technology solutions.
Kristy Walters:
As a partner, Community Power Agency brought facilitation skills and engagement skills in figuring out who the communities should be that we are talking to, who are the correct people to come along to the workshop to give their insights and experiences. What they've been through in these disaster-affected communities and at-risk communities, and designing an interactive process that makes communities and people in these workshops feel comfortable and able to express what they've been through and do that deep thinking to share their experiences with others.
Elianor Gerrard:
It's really essential that things like this are actually grounded in lived experience, and the way to do that is to go and listen and hear from communities that have gone through experiences like environmental disasters such as a fire or a flood, and hear about what they've done and then ground anything that you're wanting to inform other communities to help them prepare.
Amy McPherson:
Things that I'm worried about in terms of resiliency are the short-term emergency situations that we're finding ourselves in, whether that's bushfire or flood, but I'm also worried about the long-term energy resiliency of communities.
What I learned today were about understanding how this sort of energy resiliency happens at different levels and in different locations. At the short, more immediate short term, it made me start thinking about how I respond to an emergency situation and what the community needs to do and what I need to do as part of a community in responding to an emergency situation.
Chris Gaul:
One of the things that we thought about with this project was that resilience comes from working out what you need to do for yourself. So, we've designed a guide that isn't just about giving people information and advice but giving them the opportunity to develop their own approach to energy resilience.
Caitlin McGee:
Some of the main challenges we faced, there were two really. The first is that energy resilience is quite a complex topic, so really translating something that's quite complex into something that makes sense for communities. And the other challenge is that the topic can be quite distressing for people, especially communities who have been through disasters. So, trying to really portray the information in a way that's authentic and doesn't deny the seriousness but is also very upbeat and constructive and says here's what you can do.
Caroline Valente:
The Energy Ready Toolkit was produced in consultation with communities for communities, and we really want it to be used. It contains seven steps to guide and help communities leverage their unique features, examine the risks they face, identify shared priorities, and develop a plan of action for improving energy resilience.
So, we encourage communities all across Australia to access this rich resource, use it and reuse it as many times as possible, and tell us how the Energy Ready Toolkit made them a stronger, safer, and more energy resilient community.
