Rural, regional and remote communities can experience rapid shifts in resilience during and after events like drought, bushfire, flood, storms, or economic shocks. Yet, community leaders often lack timely data to guide decisions – relying instead on anecdotal evidence.
The Early Insights for More Resilient Communities project addresses this gap by providing up-to-date, localised data to help communities track resilience over time and identify early warning signs of stress.
Project overview
The Early Insights for More Resilient Communities (Early Insights) project aims to improve availability of data so rural, regional and remote communities can track how their resilience is changing over time and be able to see early signs of change. This is being done through an online dashboard of resilience indicators that provide data at local government scale, and which can be updated annually to provide an ongoing picture of how resilience is changing as communities experience different events – whether drought, floods, bushfire, storms, pandemic or economic downturn.
The Early Insights project started in 2023 in NSW, with a pilot project funded through the Southern NSW Innovation Hub. In 2024, the pilot Early Insights data dashboard, containing data for 2013 to 2022 for non-metropolitan NSW local government areas, was released. Data and reports from the pilot project are accessible at www.communityresilienceinsights.org.au.
The pilot dashboard included 34 indicators examining different aspects of resilience of communities. Indicators were co-designed with stakeholders who work to support people living in rural NSW communities through challenging times including drought, bushfire, flood, storms and economic change.
In 2025 and 2026, the Early Insights project is expanding to include new indicators and regions, with (i) expansion of the NSW pilot to include additional indicator and data updates for existing indicators, and (ii) establishment of pilot projects in the following additional states and territories, made possible by the Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hubs:
- Northern Territory
- Tasmania
- Victoria
- Western Australia
Expected outcomes
In early 2026, each participating Drought Hub is working with the team from the University of Canberra to hold in-person workshops in a range of locations across their State to identify the signs of changing resilience in different places.
Workshop participants will include representatives of local organisations who work in the community in both challenging times and good times, farmers and farming organisations, natural resource management organisations, local government, and a wide range of others who have different knowledge and insights.
In workshops, participants will discuss:
- Signs of changing resilience
What are the signs you see in their local community, or amongst the groups of people you work with, when their capacity to cope with challenges is changing – both the better, or for the worse?
- How relevant are different resilience indicators for you?
Current resilience indicators used by different organisations will be presented (showing available local, regional or state/territory data where it is available). Participants will be asked to comment on how useful and relevant different indicators are for them, and how existing indicators could be made more useful.
- Priority data
What are the most important types of data that should be focused on to ensure you have data available that you can use?
The workshops will be used to shape what indicators are included in data dashboards for each region.
The dashboard will be launched nationally and within each State in September 2026, with supporting seminars and video explainers provided.
This project received funding from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Climate Resilience Program.
Upcoming workshops
Anyone working in rural communities across agriculture, health, finance, land management, disaster recovery, and more is invited to join a FREE workshop to help shape a national dashboard tracking resilience where it matters most.
Select a regional workshop from the list below.
FAQs
Question 1
Question 2
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Question 3
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News
- Media Release, Uni of Canberra Early Insights
Resources
Resources
Collaborators
Project Team
Professor Jacki Schirmer
University of Canberra
Tanya Kilminster
South-West WA Drought Hub
Contact
Professor Jacki Schirmer
Professor, Centre for Environmental Governance
Professor, Health Research Institute
University of Canberra
jacki.schirmer@canberra.edu.au
Tanya Kilminster
Knowledge Broker, South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub
tkilminster@gga.org.au