Getting to Mt Resilience
What would a well-adapted and thriving town in a changing climate in Australia look like? ABC, in collaboration with Phoria, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, created an augmented reality product called ‘Mt Resilience’ that describes life in a hypothetical town of Mt Resilience in regional Australia. Mt Resilience is the most highly rendered, credible ‘picture’ that we have in Australia for how a regional city might develop and adapt to climate change and extreme events. CSIRO is using Mt Resilience as a cornerstone in their work on climate adaptation and disaster resilience with communities, industry and business, and all levels of government. Building on this work, CSIRO has developed a complementary prototype product called ‘Getting to Mt Resilience’ to show how transition and adaptation pathways can be created to adapt to increasingly uncertain futures.
Mt Resilience is being used as part of workshop and seminar processes to help people imagine their aspirational futures by provoking discussion and exploring new possibilities. Discussions about the adaptations, disaster risk reduction, and resilience investments needed to move towards these aspirational futures are then stimulated and guided using systems-based scenarios, value creation, and risk assessments (under the banner of Enabling Resilience Investment) to develop credible goals and plan future options and pathways. The Mt Resilience product (available at www.mtresilience.com) goes beyond informing and educating – it also helps to build capability and agency for transitioning to a sustainable, well-adapted and disaster-resilient future.
Mt Resilience showcases some of the technological solutions – most of which already exist – that are necessary but not sufficient to create an adapted future. The technological solutions cannot function without appropriate social and institutional supports, and changes in behaviour and decision making. This requires a range of approaches, expertise and initiatives to identify possible pathways forward, funding opportunities, and implementation strategies to meet the current and future needs of communities, cities and regions.
Getting to Mt Resilience showcases the processes and tools underpinning the Enabling Resilience Investment approach, as well as a range of other science, technology, and leading practice planning approaches. The Enabling Resilience Investment approach provides the overarching framing of engagement, assessment, learning activities, methodologies and processes that will help individuals at any level or stage of decision-making to address their gaps in knowledge and capabilities, develop options for investments, reveal trade-offs in value priorities and investment strategies amongst different groups, and create new value for the community while also meeting their service needs and mitigating disaster and climate risk.
Change is catalysed by individuals who recognise the need to create options and pathways (i.e. widen their adaptive space) to deal with increasingly uncertain futures. Individuals may have the desire to create the necessary changes to reduce their risk and be resilient but often do not have the know-how or agency to do so. This is because many of the causes of individuals’ risk or vulnerabilities to disruption are outside of their sphere of influence or control. The ‘Getting to Mt Resilience’ product is designed to help address this challenge. It provides user journeys for three personas, each representing a different kind of decision maker who would need to be involved in catalysing the required changes to the existing systems in order to enable individuals, communities and towns to begin their journeys to Mt Resilience. Decision makers at strategic, policy and project levels are guided through the various possible steps and processes they are likely to need to undertake, and it points users to the different tools and information available to help them along their journey.
What comes next?
Currently, Getting to Mt Resilience is a demonstrator, providing narratives of how different hypothetical users can work towards a climate adaptive future. Our next steps might involve building on this narrative in two related ways:
- By exploring how different users experience their own climate adaption journey using the Enabling Resilience Investment approach. Everyone’s story is unique and capturing the unique approaches to resilience investment in context will help evolve the hypothetical user journeys into documented guidance with demonstrated outcomes.
- By using the Mt Resilience platform to effectively communicate these results. Stories are a powerful way of connecting with communities and inspiring the change needed to adapt to climate change. The interactive platform that Mt Resilience and Getting to Mt Resilience use has the ability to combine powerful storytelling (grounded in the research mentioned above) with up-to-date information, guidance, and interactive functions. With further development, Getting to Mt Resilience might expand to incorporate these features, and provide an accessible package for learning and planning resilience investment opportunities.
We welcome your feedback on this first demonstrator. Please send your feedback to enablingresilienceinvestment@csiro.au.
Mt Resilience is available at: www.mtresilience.com.
Getting to Mt Resilience is available at: https://xd.adobe.com/view/34f98afc-5290-4e85-891e-725b24643b1e-61aa/?fullscreen.