Project Leaders:
Professor Helen Ross, The University of Queensland
Dr Tim Lynam, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems
Dr Margaret Gooch, James Cook University
Project 4.9.7 aims to contribute a set of indicators of social
resilience to water quality change for use by scientists,
communities, natural resource management agencies (government, NRM
agencies and industry agencies) and a more generally applicable
approach to developing these indicators.
More specifically, this objective will be achieved through
achievement of the following four sub-objectives:
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Development of indicators of social resilience to water quality
change at whole of GBR scale;
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Development of indicators of social resilience to water quality
change at catchment scale;
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Development of indicators of social resilience to water quality
change at community scale; and
-
Approach and methods for multi-scale indicator development and
conceptual model for social resilience thresholds (no activity in
Year 1).
The indicators of social resilience will make
important contributions to the knowledge framework and the design
of status and trend report cards, through providing an integrated
set of indicators for use in monitoring and reporting the general
social resilience of communities in North Queensland recognised in
the context of their relationships with ecological systems.
The indicators will also contribute to the synthesis of information
in the Integration Framework, and make important communication
contributions.
The tools for the analysis of resilience in
social-ecological systems of North Queensland will be an important
component of the Integration Framework. They will provide
both a process and tool set for integration of social, economic and
bio-physical understanding in the analysis of resilience.
Through the participatory research process of developing the
resilience analysis tools this component will also contribute to
the End User Framework through co-learning, a fundamental output of
any participatory process. Finally, the resilience analysis
tools will provide a means of exploring the impacts of some
interventions on the attributes of social resilience in particular
sites which will be an important contribution to End User endorsed
solutions; again a major output of the MTSRF process.
Each of these core research processes will
identify key social attitudes in relation to engagement and
resilience as well as the potential links between social groups,
these attitudes and behavioural intentions. These links will
provide unique opportunities to develop targeted communications
that seek to address specific attitudes of key social groups. The
case study process will enhance MTSRF scientists’ and end
users’ experience in science communication. The project
outputs therefore will make key contributions to the development
and implementation of the MTSRF communication strategy.
