Mapping the Human Experience of Disaster Recovery and Climate Adaptation

Recently we’ve been working with the team at Living Lab Northern Rivers, thinking about how to build a more holistic picture of disaster recovery and climate adaptation.

The conventional approach to understanding these challenges is to focus on technical, quantifiable and geospatial data. As best I can tell, this happens for a few different reasons: it’s the easiest information to collect; engineers and planners are more familiar and comfortable working with these types of information; the conventional questions can be answered by this information; and having ‘the numbers’ mapped out gives decision-makers a feeling of certainty and clarity.

But what happens to information that is unquantifiable, subjective and difficult to collect? What kinds of decisions are made when there’s no information about things like community values, concerns and experiences?

It’s much easier to measure the tangible, environmental dimensions of disasters. But natural disasters are inherently social because they happen to people. Recovery and adaptation are things that people do, together. This means that understanding community experiences, attitudes and values is essential when deciding how best to recover and adapt.

The aim of our work is to build a picture of natural disaster and adaptation in the Northern Rivers that puts conventional data in relation with human experience. We’re doing this to help communities and government form richer and more nuanced understandings of the landscape of adaptation.

To guide this work, we’ve developed a new framework for understanding and mapping information about adaptation:

A diagram with three sections: stories, attitudes and facts.

This framework emerged from talking with locals and experts and reading about disaster recovery and adaptation. It’s focused around three categories:

Facts: things like rainfall, zoning, population density or employment.
Stories: the experiences of individuals, groups and communities
Attitudes: beliefs and values that are held by people

From what I’ve observed, it seems that governments focus more on facts while communities focus more on stories. Thinking about all three—facts, stories and attitudes—provides a more holistic understanding.

The next steps in our design process are to think about the kinds of factual information we want to know and to consider how best to collect information about stories and attitudes. As we work through this process, these categories might shift. It is always interesting to see what happens as you move from working with assumptions to first-hand information.

It’s great to be part of an expert and forward thinking team on this project: Zerina Millard, Dan Etheridge, Matt Morphett and everyone at the Living Lab; Kate Sweetapple, Pernille Christensen and Elizabeth Mossop from UTS; and the team from the NSW Reconstruction Authority.

Looking forward to sharing more of our work with you soon. In the meantime, you can follow Parallel Lines or the Living Lab on social media for more insights and updates.

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This privacy policy may change from time to time. It was last updated on 5 February 2023.

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We collect Personal Information for the primary purpose of providing and marketing our services. We may also use your Personal Information for secondary purposes closely related to the primary purpose, in circumstances where you would reasonably expect such use or disclosure.

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