Our goal by 2025: All Australians understand what resilience is and what they can do to build fire and flood resilience in their local community.

An incredible resilience knowledge base already exists within communities, individuals and organisations. It can also be fostered through new types of training and accreditation offered through volunteering programs.

Capturing, storing and sharing this knowledge between communities, and between generations, through formal education, training, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing mechanisms, trusted technology, and citizen science networks will help to maximize the value from this knowledge over time.

People-based networks will be important to building knowledge on how to prepare for and adapt to more frequent extreme weather events. For example, in Victoria, Mallacoota’s community-led recovery process after the 2019-20 fires was informed by the community program in Strathewen a decade earlier. A member of Strathewen’s working group was flown into the Mallacoota community to act as a mentor and share knowledge between the disaster-hit communities.

Minderoo Foundation is supporting creative communication initiatives in the arts and culture sector and will engage in public awareness campaigns to improve knowledge and understanding of disaster resilience across different audience groups.

A community led, collaborative and systematic approach to building resilience knowledge – both formally and informally – will be an important factor in supporting Australian communities to understand fire and flood, to be aware of the role of fire and flood in natural landscapes, and to know what they can do to prepare in advance.