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Research shows young people want to contribute to natural disaster planning and recovery

Victoria University Media Release

Victoria University research in partnership with the Youth Affairs Council Victoria (YACVic) shows young people are keen to get involved during times of natural disaster preparation and recovery, yet they have few opportunities to help or have their needs heard.

Associate Professor Fiona MacDonald and YACVic colleagues drew on the experiences and views of young people in regional areas affected by the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 for the study, and found many felt overlooked during times of crisis.

She called for natural disaster decision-makers and strategies to “change the narrative about young people, and regard them as capable and constructive ‘agents of change’ in their communities, instead of vulnerable and passive victims when preparing for, and recovering from natural disasters.”

Associate Professor MacDonald said this approach echoes an international disaster risk reduction strategy in the United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

“When young people are included in disaster management, there are benefits for themselves, their peers, community, and the environment. Yet as they increasingly seek opportunities to engage with issues that will impact them and their futures, they often find they are sidelined,” Associate Professor MacDonald said.

Young people in the study reported they heard adults talking to them instead of with them, and not seeking their perspectives about what they needed to rebuild their own resilience for future events.

She recommended government, community organisations, and educational institutions establish formal structures to provide opportunities and recognised training for young people to get involved across all levels of natural disaster planning and management.

The research examined the success of Rural Young Activators, a youth empowerment pilot program that was developed in regional Victoria with YACVic following the 2019-20 bushfires to support, upskill, and build the confidence of young people through local advocacy projects.

In 2020, YACVic partnered with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Victoria (RSPCA Victoria) for young people to co-create animal welfare projects following the bushfires.

Research from this program about ways young people could be better engaged and empowered during natural disasters recommends:

  • providing opportunities for young people to assist with rebuilding and clean-up, so they develop local skills and a sense of community contribution
  • ensuring government-funded youth workers and youth-safe spaces are established in areas prone to natural disasters in advance of disasters to help young people build prior resilience and connections
  • ensuring young people are meaningfully included in governance committees that make decisions about disaster preparedness and recovery.

Agents of change in bushfire recovery: Young people’s acts of citizenship in a youth-focused, animal-welfare and environmental program was recently published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Management.

 

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4 comments

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  1. Canguro

    Young people, it barely needs noting, are the next generation (or two, by virtue of how young we’re defining). Young people, also, by virtue of ages-old attitudes of older generations, are often precluded, denied, restricted, disenfranchised, from the arenas of activity occupied by their elders. Cliched views and opinions suggest they’re not up to playing in the deep end of the adult swimming pool.

    Much is this attitudinal bias is codswallop and unnecessarily unhelpful… I’d suggest that historically and socially there exist many examples of situations and circumstances where the inclusion of young people has been a normal & natural aspect of the functioning of the local societies, whether prehistoric, aboriginal, agrarian or other.

    Given that it’s these young people who will inherit the considerable mess their elders have made of the myriad systems, natural and man-made, that constitute the complex fabric that supports both human and other life-forms on this precious organic orb that exists within the locus of a single star that itself is within the locus of a single galaxy, one such entity amid unknowable gazillions within a universe of seemingly unknowable dimensions, it would behove us all to do our very best to include these inheritors of the cluster-fucked natural and human-built environments that currently constitute our bequest, poor as it may well turn out to be. Anything less satisfies that cynical expression of the elderly being on a skiing holiday,,,, spending the kid’s inheritance.

  2. New England Cocky

    Uhm ….. so here in Armidale NSW the local volunteer organisations including Rural Fire Service and State Emergency Service are keen to recruit and train all ”young” people over about age 16 years. There are regular mid-week and weekend training sessions.
    .
    I guess another disadvantage of living in a metropolitan area is that there is insufficient open space and clean air for the population to bother about these matters.

  3. B Sullivan

    When we were young, those of us who advocated prevention of ecological and environmental disaster were ridiculed and derided. Decade after decade after decade our concerns were dismissed as ‘pixie dust’. Do you remember that, Mr Albenese? It wasn’t until 1996 that John Howard made the patronising declaration that being concerned about the environment was no longer a fad, and if we elected him to power he would raise the money needed to fix the problem once and for all by transferring a third of the public’s extremely lucrative revenue raiser Telstra into the grasping hands of the private sector.

    Our concerns were always dismissed with the belief that science would always come up with a cure, just like it always does. When science warned us instead that we must pursue a course of prevention, science was in turn derided, dismissed and ignored. Economic Rationalism decreed that an ever growing economy based on unsustainable development driven by an ever growing population of consumers was far, far more important than sustaining the environment.

    Tomorrow is beginning of June. The human population of the earth has already this year consumed more natural resources than the earth can replace in a whole year. That is the real debt crisis that Economic Rationalists are wilfully blind to.

    We have now run out of time and reached a point where prevention may no longer be an option. The moronic optimism that no action was required is now to be replaced with the equally moronic optimism that the young people of today are ready, capable and determined to clean up the mess that their elders insisted upon making.

    Tell me. How are the young going to recover from the looming disaster of mass extinction when finally the remorseless destruction wreaked by our Anthropomorthic Age makes the survival of all the other species that we depend upon in order to survive on this planet, completely untenable, when so many of the young, like Greta and the Extinction Rebellion are still fiercely being opposed and derided for wishing to prevent it?

    They shall not grow old, as we who preceded them grow old.
    Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
    With the collapse of the environment and the mass extinction that follows,
    No one will remember them.

  4. Terence Mills

    Not so long ago each state of our federation and the Northern Territory had their own state government owned insurance office.

    These were insurance providers of last resort in many respects, reflecting the fickle nature of the private insurance market.

    In our wisdom we allowed our state governments to sell off these important assets, largely to overseas interests who, quite happily pull out of the market when the “when the going gets tough”.

    We will live to regret that decisions !

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