Communities across Australia are under increasing pressure from climate disasters and pandemics. Extreme heat, extreme storms and disease outbreaks are not future challenges, they’re impacting households and communities right now. Australia's latest National Climate Risk Assessment is a startling reminder of the need to find new ways of working together to enhance our collective disaster resilience.
Against this backdrop, there is an increased recognition that public institutions – including universities - have a role to play in supporting communities to prepare for future disaster events. Universities have important social responsibilities, including in their roles as educators, employers, research hubs, and stewards of significant physical and social infrastructures.
The growing importance of participatory, community-led disaster planning suggests that these resources and services should be integrated into local disaster resilience and adaptation. However, climate adaptation and resilience building is still nascent in the higher education sector.
Learning from local knowledges
Over the last twelve months, a team of researchers at the Sydney Environment Institute and Sydney Policy Lab have been developing a better model and set of practices for how the University of Sydney supports its communities to navigate climate shocks, extreme weather, disease outbreaks and other disasters.
Through a series of deliberative workshops and roundtables, supported by an award-winning scenario planning tool the Adaptation Game, our workshops brought together representatives from the community, local government, civil society, and the university to share their lived experiences of disasters at the university’s main campus in Camperdown/Sydney and clinical school in Westmead/Parramatta. Our aim was to better understand how people are currently experiencing climate pressures, while also surfacing ideas about how the University could support locally-led adaptation.
Importantly, we also integrated insights from the University’s regional and rural campus sites, including the University Centre for Rural Health in Lismore and the agricultural campus in Camden. University staff and students at these sites have already activated their research, education, and partnerships networks for recovery and resilience efforts during catastrophic flooding and bushfires. This provides valuable lessons into the ways the university can support place-based resilience and enhance already effective approaches.
Our workshop participants painted a rich picture of the challenges that climate shocks and other disasters impose upon communities across Greater Sydney. Extreme weather, disease outbreaks, and other disasters are compromising access to critical systems such as transport, energy, food, and health. Transport shutdowns, power blackouts, heat-related health issues, maladapted housing, and work and study disruptions are exacerbating existing patterns of disadvantage across the community. Social isolation is another pressing challenge. Without strong place-based connections, people struggle to access local knowledge, resources and social support that underpin effective disaster response. These challenges can have long-lasting impacts on community wellbeing and the healthy functioning of critical systems.
Becoming Familiar Faces
When we asked our participants how the university could help, the key message was clear - don’t reinvent the wheel. Universities can best enable local resilience by supporting and synching with what’s already in place. Central to this, is building long-standing partnerships with local government, civil society, and surrounding communities, grounded in an ethic of mutual respect. From these relationships, the university’s diverse capabilities can be harnessed for adaptation measures that are locally ground and meaningful.
In our latest report, Becoming Familiar Faces (2026) (pdf, 4.9MB), we track community suggestions across the university’s core functionalities.
Collaboration and partnerships
Participants want to see a greater emphasis on partnerships, flexibility and responsiveness in disaster planning. This means more consultation and co-design, including regular opportunities for cross-sector dialogue and robust, ongoing financial support for grassroots initiatives and networks. As a ‘community of communities’, universities can support this by connecting staff, students, local governments, and neighboring communities through long-term investment in partnerships and better support for collaborative governance processes. This might look like facilitating cross-sector “sandpits” or innovation labs to test collaborative disaster responses ahead of time, developing community-facing disaster plans with key stakeholders, enabling student volunteering opportunities within courses/degrees, and facilitating ongoing consultation between relevant agencies and community-based representatives. Importantly, this requires a shift from short-term, project-based funding toward long-term, robust partnerships.
Education and communication
Lack of information, or misinformation, impedes effective disaster response. Communities want to see tailored information, messaging and resources delivered by trusted local leaders – so they’re empowered to make context-sensitive decisions. They also want policy makers to do a better job at listening to them, by integrating local knowledges into technical plans and analysis. Universities have been identified as intermediaries that can facilitate this kind of two-way knowledge exchange. This might look like translating complex emergency planning into community-facing disaster readiness plans, harnessing student-led communication channels to deliver preparedness campaigns, embedding resilience training into curriculum, and supporting community-based student service learning. As a community of knowledge, universities can also drive research agendas that map critical social networks, identify place-based risks, and document and amplify lived experience and local knowledges.
Physical and natural infrastructure
In addition to these more relational aspects, community also expressed an urgent need to improve the resilience of the built and natural environment. Participants want to see improved building standards and design, access to public spaces of refuge for extreme weather events, a climate-proof transport system, increased public green space and canopy coverage, and more shade along bus stops, train stations, and critical pedestrian walkways. As stewards of significant public infrastructures, the extent to which universities consider climate resilience in their land and asset management planning has significant impacts on local communities. Participants were also eager to see universities harness their facilities and infrastructures to support grassroots adaptation work. This might include connecting local networks and initiatives with university facilities (kitchens, office space), extending opening hours in cool third spaces (libraries) during extreme weather, hosting pop-up cooling stations in extreme heat, and establishing or supporting community resilience hubs.
Resilience building as an ongoing, relational process
Building resilient communities is a complex and continuous process, rather than a process with a definitive end point or ‘destination’. Our climate-challenged world presents a new opportunity for universities to fulfill their public good mission by aligning research, education, governance, and land management agendas with local resilience building and long-term adaptation. This requires a shift in values. Through developing long-term community partnerships built on respect, humility, flexibility, and trust, universities can become deeply embedded local presences, enhancing the resilience of the places in which they operate.
The University of Sydney is currently preparing its first Climate and Nature Transition Plan, a seven-year road map to transition the university towards a low-carbon, nature-positive future. This includes a pillar of action to enhance the resilience and adaptive capacity of its staff, students, and communities. The University’s Office of Sustainability is working closely with key stakeholders across its campuses to map climate vulnerabilities and develop place-based resilience and adaptation plans. It's my great pleasure to carry the community insights and recommendations from the Universities' Responsibilities in Disasters project into the new strategy.
About the author:
Alex McAlpin is an early career researcher, specialising in disaster resilience and community-led development. She was the Research Assistant on the Universities' Responsibilities in Disasters project, alongside Scott Webster, Louise Beehag, David Schlosberg, Kate Harrison Brennan, and Danielle Celermajer. Now based at the University of Sydney's Office of Sustainability, Alex is translating community insights and recommendations from the project into the university's first resilience and adaptation strategy.
Header image: community workshop for the Universities' Responsibilities in Disasters project. Supplied by the Sydney Environment Institute.
The Universities' Responsibilities in Disasters project recently released its report, Becoming Familiar Faces: How Universities Can Become Allies in Community-Based Responses to Climate Disasters (pdf, 4.9MB), with a panel discussion with leading resilience practitioners and community advocates which explored ways that universities can activate their people, networks, expertise, resources, and infrastructure to strengthen local resilience.
Catch up on the launch now on the SEI Podcast Series, including opening remarks by Professor David Schlosberg, panel conversation with Dr Joshua Bird, Maddy Braddon, and Laura Minchella, chaired by Dr Kate Harrison Brennan, and report launch by Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Mike Ryan.