Julie Brook

Principal, Meridian Urban

Julie Brook is a Principal and local and regional planning specialist with over 15 years experience across the public and private sectors. Julie also holds an MBA, providing her with diverse business and project management skills for a holistic governance, policy and strategy outlook. Julie is experienced in translating complex legislative frameworks, planning instruments and policy formation, land use strategies, risk-based planning and planning for resilient communities. She is skilled in natural hazard integration for landslide, flood and coastal hazards. Her strong analytical skills compliment her specialist capabilities. Julie has been accepted as a Building Tribunal Referee.

Doing it differently – Ground up resilience - community scale natural hazards risk understanding: Lessons from policy to practice in Douglas Shire Qld

Douglas Shire is one of Australia’s pristine environments and part of the UNESCO World Heritage Wet Tropics. People live there because of connection to the landscape whether this is economic or cultural. Small, isolated communities, divided by a ferry, large visitor numbers and some residents who don’t wish to be found, while simultaneously facing Queensland’s greatest risks in natural hazards from cyclones, flood, coastal hazards, landslide, bushfire and increasingly heatwaves.

Douglas Shire Council embarked on an ambitious Community Resilience project through risk understanding development in hyper-localised ‘scorecards’ modelled on the UN Resilient Cities Scorecard concept. The project focussed on significant engagement at small scale to understand community attitudes to risk from natural hazards.

Through the community engagement a baseline of existing understanding and resilience at a neighbourhood-level is developed, including indigenous perspectives through the Jabalbina Land and Sea Rangers. It highlighted community understanding of mapped land use planning constrains, evoked conversation on sustainable settlement patterns, legacy and long term adaptation.

Risk assessments were drafted through best practice methodology, using existing risk data and public sources across five natural hazards, with impacts mapped to an adapted version of the functional lines of recovery and then applied to the seven places. Through further community consultation, a ‘resilience vision’ and ‘risk statement’ was prepared and tested for each community before developing final scorecards.

These include technical risk exposure and vulnerability information in a format the community can use to forward resilience actions at small scale. This is a first step to creating a pathway for inclusive decision making and community scale risk understanding.

The strategy will enable community identified actions to be elevated through the local disaster management framework to achieve a resilient community, which is well-placed to manage hazards and to minimize their effects and/or to recover quickly.