This indicator examines whether communities are able to successfully navigate challenges. This is often referred to as being resilient to challenges, with resilience including the ability of a community to prepare for, cope with, and recover from challenges. The challenges rural communities experience are many and varied, and include:

• natural hazard events such as drought, floods, bushfire, and storms
• pest, disease and biosecurity challenges such as mouse plagues, loss of agricultural production to pests or diseases or due to loss of crop pollination
• economic challenges and shocks, such as closure of a large employer or a government service, closure of an industry or loss of access to a resource that previously supported local industry and employment (such as reduced access to forests, land, water or mineral resources), supply chain challenges, or loss of markets
• social challenges such as conflict or disagreement between local groups.

While many of the other indicators included in the Hub provide insight into wellbeing outcomes you would expect to see in a community that is successfully navigating challenges (such as maintaining population, services and infrastructure, and social cohesion), this indicator specifically examines how confident local people are that their community can prepare for, cope with, respond to and recover from challenges while maintaining a good quality of life for the residents living in it.

For Australia’s rural communities, being able to successfully prepare for, cope with, respond to and recover from challenges is an important requirement for maintaining quality of life – in other words, for supporting the wellbeing of their residents. A community that has high wellbeing but little capacity to cope with, respond to and recover from challenges is at high risk of wellbeing loss if it experiences a significant challenge. One that has good capacity to cope, respond and recover is much more likely to maintain high community wellbeing over the long term.  With the typical Australian rural community experiencing at least one (and often multiple) natural hazards every few years, this indicator is an important way of tracking if a community has the resilience to challenges necessary to continue providing the conditions for a good quality of life for its residents.

Advantages: Including indicators of community resilience such as this one provide better insight into whether a community is likely to be able to support quality of life into the future, when compared to indicators that focus only on measuring current wellbeing levels.

Disadvantages: This indicator relies on the subjective ratings of local residents. Sometimes a resident may have little knowledge of whether their community has the ability to do well in preparing for, responding to and recovering from challenges, particularly if they have only recently moved to the local area. It is important to allow people to indicate that they are not sure, rather than forcing an answer that may not reflect actual community capacity.

Measures examining community capacity to navigate challenges are included in the annual Regional Wellbeing Survey (RWS), and can be included in any community survey. In addition to the measure examples provided below, it is possible to ask many more question in surveys of residents. For example, it is possible to ask residents what is affecting capacity of the community to cope with challenges, and questions about specific challenges such as closure of a large employer, loss of an industry, supply chain difficulties, or specific natural hazard events such as drought, flood, storms or bushfire.