A new Network project in South Australia aims to ensure clean energy solutions are designed with communities – strengthening local leadership, improving supply resilience, and supporting self-determination in the energy transition. 

The Energy Ready Guidebook helps guide communities through the process of planning for, coping with and bouncing back from climate-related weather events like extreme heat and fires, floods and storms that disrupt energy supply.

The Guidebook explains what energy resilience means for communities and includes advice from communities that have experienced, or are at high risk of experiencing, climate-related disasters, and includes step-by-step instructions for seven simple activities community groups can do. 

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. Vital guidance and information on resilience was also provided by the project’s Steering Reference Group.

The Guidebook was funded by Energy Consumers Australia and delivered in partnership with the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), Community Power Agency and Parallel Lines.

Read the Guidebook here

The 2019–20 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires were unprecedented in their size, scale, and devastation. It was widely acknowledged that the bushfires disproportionally impacted Aboriginal people both in terms of the population of people affected, and the deep impact felt as people connected to the land.

Yet at the height of the crisis, stories emerged of culturally unsafe and unwelcoming relief and recovery services, as well as the uneven responses of emergency services to safeguard and protect cultural heritage.

The rupturing of these demographic faultlines exposed Aboriginal people to additional risk and created a distinct Aboriginal experience within the larger bushfire catastrophe – a disaster within a disaster.

In response, Aboriginal communities and their organisations rallied, evacuating community members, providing immediate relief and support to communities and families affected, and taking their own steps to protect their cultural and heritage values.

This paper by Associate Professor William Fogarty (2022) brings together these stories, captured through various media articles, reports, submissions and testimony, synthesising the common experiences of Aboriginal peoples and the response of their communities and organisations. It draws attention to deep constitutions of strength and resilience embedded within Aboriginal communities, whilst highlighting the trust deficit now engendered between Aboriginal people and relief and recovery agencies.

It finishes by reaffirming the importance of community-controlled and representative Aboriginal organisations in emergency management, response, and recovery in future disasters.

Read the paper here