Our work
The Resilient Futures Investment Roundtable is funded through the Commonwealth Government’s Disaster Risk Reduction Package. This funding is supporting members to build capacity and capability across sectors, and to explore approaches to resilience valuation that recognise the systemic and cascading nature of climate risk. It also considers the broad economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of resilience building projects.
Our approach is to learn by doing and to work in collaboratively with others. We are piloting resilience valuation approaches, sharing the learnings, insights and recommendations to enable other organisations to improve the way decisions are made about resilience investment.
As we learn from practical experience and through collaborative efforts, we are collecting and sharing insights as we go.
Our Goals
- Public and private sector investors improve decision making processes
- Increase in avoided losses to households and organisations
- New resilience investment products enter the marketplace
- Optimised community impact as community benefits are better understood and incorporated into planning
- Tangible evidence of how community outcomes have been prioritised and improved, leading to better targeted resilience programs
We have been working collaboratively to understand and address the challenges that organisations face when considering costs and benefits of resilience.
We have defined a robust approach as one that adopts a systemic, multi-hazard and whole-of-life perspective considering the interdependencies and externalities. We undertook a scan of available approaches, which identified many initiatives, frameworks, standards, tool and methodologies in a busy and evolving landscape. However, we found that very few tools met our criteria of a comprehensive, robust approach. Instead, approaches tend to focus on specific outcomes of the quadruple bottom line, which can detract from a systemic view of resilience. This, compounded by the fact that many tools are very technical or bespoke, means this landscape can be challenging to navigate.
This work helped us to understand the resilience valuation landscape and the challenges facing organisations who want to expand on traditional cost-benefit analysis to understand the true impact of resilience investment. This includes a need to build capability to simply navigate the resilience valuation landscape and choose the right tool.
To meet this need, we provide a forum for cross-sector capacity building, knowledge sharing and identifying potential opportunities for collaborative partnerships on complex challenges. Members are also working together to develop guidance materials, case studies and supporting resources and learning opportunities.
Resources co-developed by the Roundtable are designed to help interested stakeholders to understand and navigate the landscape of valuing resilience, and access examples of organisations who are using robust tools to improve decisions about when, where and how to invest in resilience.
Research Statements are published regularly to share key findings from research, collaboration and practice at different stages of our exploration of the resilience valuation landscape.
Case studies of resilience valuation in practice shed light on the suitability of existing tools and resources to measure the costs and benefits of resilience-building in different decision-making contexts.