Building back better – and fairer

Dr Monica Taylor, QUT School of Law

Disasters can be lethal. They can kill or injure loved ones, ruin infrastructure, and rupture the established rhythms of daily life. Work, health, schooling, relationships and family routines can be literally turned upside down, without notice.

While disaster misfortune can strike anyone, research is clear that disasters do not affect everyone equally. We know that some people and communities recover quickly, while others are disproportionately impacted and endure extremely long and hard recovery journeys. Some people and communities will simply get left behind. Societal injustices that exist before a disaster strikes will increase a person’s exposure to harm and make their recovery more difficult. However, none of this is inevitable, and there are many ways to reduce injustice and inequity in disasters as well as strengthen our future resilience.

To build disaster resilience and know what fairness in disaster recovery requires, we first need to understand – what is a disaster?

A disaster is not simply a natural hazard. An extreme event may happen – a river floods, a bushfire rages, an earthquake shatters or a virus spreads – but it is neither the weather nor the virus that is itself the disaster.

The disaster is what comes next.

Scholars all over the world are clear that disasters occur because of the choices we make as a society that increase people’s risk of exposure to harm. How and where we build our cities and housing. How and when we preserve or destroy our natural environment. What laws and social policies we put in place to support people and communities – people with disabilities, living in poverty, the very young and old, people from different cultural backgrounds, and people living with discrimination or social exclusion.

Poverty, housing precarity, climate change and environmental degradation are all background conditions that create disasters and ensure their unequal impact.

As the earth’s seasons become more erratic and our weather less predictable due to climate change, communities worldwide will continue to face the full brunt of disasters and the inevitably long, slow and hard road to recovery.

We need only switch on our TVs to see extreme heatwaves and wildfires in Europe, or lethal flash flooding and mudslides in China, or the devastating Himalayan avalanche in Nepal.

Preparing for disasters and building our resilience to them is a growing priority, here in Australia and abroad. Now more than ever, we need to be equipped to understand how to prevent disaster injustice and strengthen community resilience to disasters that will become increasingly frequent, intense and complex.

How disasters are managed has a big influence on how people experience and recover from them.

Disaster management has traditionally been a very centralised, government-led process, without the voices of communities or impacted people involved in policy design, or in making decisions that affect them. For example, if a flood or cyclone inundates a region and a temporary housing solution is needed, people ought to have a say in what type of housing will suit their family or community.

Local communities know best what they need to recover well, and local knowledge can shape decisions about how to optimally support community recovery. Good, human rights-respecting disaster management puts people at the centre of the laws and policies designed to help them in times of crisis.

If we formally integrate community perspectives into disaster recovery efforts, disaster management will become more adaptive, targeted and responsive to the needs of the affected population. This means that people most at risk of harm are less likely to experience disadvantage, discrimination or exclusion due to the disaster.

Governments tend to be quite good at rebuilding hard infrastructure after a disaster. A lot of attention and resourcing goes into rebuilding roads and physical structures which, though essential, are only one part of the disaster recovery puzzle.

What is equally important is investment in social infrastructure; in community ties and social connection. What this looks like will be different for every community, but investing in social capital is vital for strengthening community resilience.

Local people know one another, their history and context better than any outsider. Indigenous peoples know Country, care for Country, and hold stories of the land that are so important for us to heed as part of our disaster preparedness strategies. Indigenous peoples are Australia’s first disaster management experts; they hold knowledge that predates all modern disaster management manuals.

Investing in care and connection as an intrinsic part of disaster management will strengthen our future resilience to disasters.

Technology is reshaping how we live and work. At the same time, culture, ethics and communities are shaping how technology evolves. The biggest challenges of our time sit where these forces meet.

The new Bachelor of Arts at QUT is designed for that intersection. As a university of technology, QUT brings a distinctive perspective to the humanities, combining critical thinking with digital capability, research expertise with real-world application, and creative insight with industry awareness.

Make a real impact by helping communities recover from disasters and build resilience for the future with the Bachelor of Arts (Disaster, Justice and Community Recovery).