Reimagining Resilience Forum

‘leading the conversation on resilience’

Welcome to our new exciting initiative – the Reimagining Resilience Forum. This initiative has been designed to promote the best thinking and practice in the emerging space of resilience. Speakers from a variety of disciplines are invited to engage in interdisciplinary discussions. The overall experience aims to add value to the existing work that many of you already undertake, and also to explore new approaches to building resilience in our cities, local communities and businesses, as well as on a personal, individual level.

 

Why the Forum

The Global Resilience Collaborative (GRC) firmly believes in the power of conversation; particularly the kind of conversation where every participant is a valued contributor. Lived experience, knowledge, ideas, information, relationships all matter. The initiative is designed to create conditions for trans-disciplinary dialogue, learning and innovation that will lead to new ways of thinking about resilience. Our hope is that new ideas will lead to new solutions and projects and programs that will make resilience a genuine value.

 

Why Reimagining Resilience

Disruptions are not new. But in our hyper-connected world, disruptions have acquired a new relevance; they’re now a key feature of our lives. Some disruptions immediately trigger a recovery process. Others trigger more adaptive processes.

Natural disasters generate a special kind of disruption. The disruption associated with a natural disaster lasts longer. Recovery can take more than 10 years. There may be several disasters that ‘roll over’, one on top of the other, as seen recently in Nepal when a second damaging earthquake was experienced only days after the first.

Natural disasters increasingly tend to have a knock-on effect that reaches far beyond the area of immediate impact. The damage to nuclear power plants from the Fukushima tsunami in March 2013 resulted in an impact far beyond the tsunami itself. This type of disruption renders traditional notions of disaster management almost irrelevant. In a world where there are on average 2-3 disasters per day, this is particularly important.

Disruption is the new normal. Cultivating our resilience will give towns, cities, countries, businesses, indeed all of us, the edge to survive and more importantly prosper in a world dominated by the unknown and the improbable. Now is the time to extend our discourse on disasters beyond Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery, to Resilience. Resilience has increasingly proven to be the best possible answer to the relentless level of disruption brought on by natural disasters.

 

Listen sessions

Professor Paul Arbon from the Torrens Resilience Institute speaks about disaster resilience. The Torrens Resilience Institute was established in 2008 by the Government of South Australia to improve the capacity of organisations and societies to respond to disruptive challenges that have the potential to overwhelm local disaster management capabilities and plans. Prof Arbon’s current projects focus on strengthening disaster resilience through community, organisational and individual capacity and capability building, the societal impacts of emergencies and disaster, and mass gathering health care.

 

Anthony Frangi speaking about media and natural disaster. Anthony is a Senior Media and Communications specialist with more than 30 years’ experience in media management, programming, journalism and communication. Anthony was General Manager and Content Director for the Fairfax Radio Network in Brisbane between 2012 and 2015. His next publication on media and natural disasters is due for release in late 2016.

 

The recording captures the discussion about resilience, disasters and women. An initiative by Global Resilience Collaborative aims to further interdisciplinary dialogue about resilience to disruptions such as natural disasters.