Book of Abstracts 2013 - Australian and New Zealand Disaster ...

Aucklanders will also receive advance notification of impending disasters such as tsunamis and cyclones, as well as
important information following a major catastrophe such as an earthquake.
Ms Julie Molloy
Director, Social Engagements, Volunteering Qld
The Role of NGOs in Building Sustainable Community Resilience
This paper will discuss the broad role that impact driven NGOs can play in disaster management and sustainable
community resilience building through an exploration of the findings and impacts of the largest community resilience
building program in Australia, led by a non-government organisation.
Planning for crisis management, business continuity and protection of infrastructure and assets only make up part of
the larger picture that is sustained community resilience. Social capital, community competence and local leadership
capacity are critical to a community’s capability to prepare, mitigate, respond and recover from disaster. These
qualities are the social infrastructure which should inform and in many ways underpin the foundation of any hard
infrastructure. However, in order to attain these adaptive capacities, long-term community development and capacity
building strategies are required.
There are inherent challenges for disaster management agencies trying to engage communities in dialogue around
planning risk-informed response and recovery plans for disasters. Limited resources often inhibit the capacity of
emergency services to undertake community education and engagement activities which often sit outside their core
business as response agencies.
NGOs contrastingly are ideally placed to work in and with the communities which they service, to educate and support
them at all stages of disaster management. Importantly, NGOs already engage with a large majority of those members in
community which would be most vulnerable in disasters and have an ongoing and trusted presence in the community.
This paper will argue that NGOs are uniquely placed to work in and with community over the long term in order to
develop the adaptive capacities, whilst advocating for the need to create stronger partnerships and more significant
funding opportunities for the sector to engage in resilience building activities.
Providing evidence based look at the outcomes and learning’s from over six unique programmatic approaches to
building community resilience to natural disasters; Describing the methodology and systems that support this
qualitative work, allowing for scalability and sustainability.
Dr Krishna Nadimpalli
Team Leader, Geoscience Australia
Co Authors - Mr Martin Wehner, Structural Engineer, Geoscience Australia. Dr Paolo Gamba, Associate Professor,
University of Pavia.
Global Exposure Database to Underpin Earthquake Risk Assessment Worldwide
Global Earthquake Model (GEM) foundation is developing tools and resources for worldwide earthquake risk
assessment. The tools will allow users to apply both probabilistic and deterministic methods to estimate losses.
Exposure data is a critical component in the model. GEM has set up a project (GED4GEM) to develop a Global Exposure
Database (GED) that consists of global building stock and population distribution. This database has been designed to
include the spatial, structural characteristics, repair cost and occupancy related information that underpins damage,
loss and human casualty estimation models. The project is being undertaken by the GED4GEM consortium with