Recovery: local recovery planning

Video transcript

Queenslanders know a lot about recovering from disasters. They strike every year in Queensland.

And while we can't stop cyclones, floods or bush fires, we can certainly prepare our communities for them and support their recovery after them.

Natural disasters come in all shapes and sizes. And sometimes, even a small event will create enough damage that communities will require support to recover.

Event-specific recovery plan for your community

Here, we will talk through the steps to develop an event-specific recovery plan for your community following a disaster.

While there are many people and agencies involved in recovery, council and the recovery groups lead the coordination.

Community Profile

As a start, develop a community profile to ensure you understand your community. What are your strengths and capabilities? What are your vulnerabilities?

Impacts

Just after a natural disaster and as part of the initial response, it's time to identify the impacts and disruptions to the community.

Remember to take into account direct impacts, such as infrastructure damage or crop losses, and indirect impacts, such as cleanup and business disruption.

It's important to engage with local disaster management and recovery groups, and other stakeholders at this time, ensuring the community is involved. 

• (Human and social) There could be individuals who have suffered physical or psychosocial impacts as well as loss of homes or livelihoods.
• (Economic) Small businesses and primary producers could suffer disruption to services or supply, or damage to property or livestock.
• (Built) (Roads and Transport) Buildings and infrastructure can be damaged or destroyed in a disaster, which can affect anyone or everyone in the community.
• (Environment) In the natural environment, national parks, waterways, and coastlines can be damaged.

Now you understand what has happened, it's time to assess the impacts, which will help you identify your recovery challenges.

For example, is there disruption to business, which will result in financial losses?

Actions

Not all impacts and consequences need to be recovered from, some might create positive change and your planning process should harness this.

From here, you can see what actions will need to occur in order to support the community to reach a recovered state.

Look at all the options available and make sure you understand any risks, and think about options for funding these activities.

Recovery plan

All of the information you have gathered will feed into your event-specific recovery plan.

Your plan captures impacts and provides a roadmap for a successful recovery, including who is responsible for each activity.

Your plan will feed into a state recovery plan, if one is being developed.

Make sure it is endorsed by all the necessary stakeholders.

It's a good idea to share your recovery plan so the community can see the journey.

It's important to monitor the implementation of your plan. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it.

Monitoring

Monitoring will show whether you've got it right. Will your actions help meet your objectives? Do you need to change up what you are doing?

Finally, it's important to evaluate your program. Did you meet your objectives? What could you do better? What worked well?

Of course, those learnings should take you right back to where you started, at your community profile. It's time to update it with information you learnt during disaster recovery and any changes that have occurred in the community following the recovery operations. It will help you next time.