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AIDR joins Resilience Valuation Initiative

AIDR has joined a broad cross-section of organisations working on the new Resilience Valuation Initiative launched by the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities (ABR).

The Resilience Valuation Initiative is a coalition of stakeholders seeking to advance an accepted process with enabling methodologies for understanding the value of a resilience-building asset, feature or activity. The process will recognise the systemic nature of climate and disaster risks and important environmental, social, economic and governance factors.

The initiative aims to mobilise public and private stakeholders in Australia to develop and use a practical solution that values resilience and better calculates community benefits, with a vision for increased proactive investment in physical community resilience measures to protect vulnerable Australian communities.

Reports from the ABR have shown that targeted investments in physical and community resilience measures can significantly lessen the cost of disasters caused by natural hazards. However, there is an absence of reliable and accessible valuation approaches that would allow resilience monetisation for business cases as a driving cause for the lack of such investment. The Resilience Valuation Initiative is set to address this gap.

This week the initiative released its first statement Functional and reliable: what organisations want from an approach to value resilience. It describes what Resilience Valuation Initiative participants want from an approach that supports them to better value resilience, the decisions they want to focus on and the outcomes this would drive.

The statement outlines a need for an approach to valuing resilience that is functional and reliable. It should adopt a broad, systemic and whole-of-life perspective considering interdependencies and externalities, with outputs that enable different storytelling approaches that speak to both the hearts and minds of their stakeholders.

Through a co-created and freely available process for policymakers and investors to value investment in resilience, the Resilience Valuation Initiative believes acceptability and feasibility of disaster resilience interventions will improve.

The initiative currently has 23 participating organisations and welcomes more organisations to join who would like to participate in testing or other parts of the work program.