11 November 2025
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An Australian-first online tool capturing the factors contributing to community resilience in the face of extreme climate events such as droughts, bushfires, and floods has proved so valuable that it’s expanding across the country.
Last year, University of Canberra researcher Jacki Schirmer led a team from across the Hub partner organisations to develop the Early Insights for More Resilient Communities Dashboard for NSW.
Now a new and improved dashboard is expanding into Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Victoria.
Hub Director Cindy Cassidy said she’s excited about the expansion which is the result of a great piece of collaboration with Drought Resilience and Adoption Hubs in those states and territories.
“The dashboard was developed after identifying a big gap in the ability to pinpoint changes in community well-being,” she said.
“We could see that consecutive natural hazard events meant there was little time for people and services to recover before starting preparations for the next one. It was taking a huge toll on communities.”
Since it launched publicly in June 2024, the Early Insights for More Resilient Communities Dashboard has been a reliable source of evidence about what’s happening on the ground in rural NSW, allowing users to visualise their social, environmental and economic resilience.
The online platform has an inbuilt set of indicators to track resilience across nine domains, involving gauging measures such as school attendance, community wellbeing, and access to trades, which all help to identify community resilience pressure points.
“Those early warning signals reflecting changes in resilience allow service providers, and local, state and federal governments, to mobilise and take action where it’s really going to have an impact,” Cindy Cassidy said.
“The real data generated by this tool is turning complex lived experiences into something actionable. It’s helping regional people understand how they’re tracking and how they might prepare for what comes next.
“The overwhelming response and enthusiasm from our communities, as well as state and local governments, in using the dashboard, encouraged us to explore its expansion interstate. However, it’s more than just geographic expansion – for the first time, this expanded tool is going to also provide agriculturally relevant metrics and data.”
This new iteration of the Early Insights for More Resilient Communities Dashboard includes up to 10 new state-specific indicators and up to 10 new national indicators. It includes updated datasets current to 2025, for examplethe 2025 Regional Wellbeing Survey (one of the data sources for the dashboard) now includes questions about the challenges of working in Australian agriculture.
Director of the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, Dr Jo Wisdom, said that the state faces unique challenges when it comes to building drought and climate resilience.
“By joining the Early Insights project, SW WA Hub can bring in regionally relevant data and indicators that give us a clearer picture of how our communities are coping, and where extra support is needed,” Dr Wisdom said.
“This will help ensure resources and strategies are targeted where they can make the greatest impact.”
Liana Williams, Lead Knowledge Broker with the Tasmanian Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub (TAS Farm Innovation Hub), said the dashboard will be refined for Tasmania before being up and running locally by mid-2026.
“We see the dashboard as an important tool to help understand where communities are at in terms of their resilience, and how this broader context relates to farm resilience,” she said.
“Having the ability to tailor the tool and dashboard to ensure it is relevant and meaningful for Tasmania will help the Hub and other stakeholders make decisions and develop programs for the realities we are facing. The potential of the tool is very powerful.”
Southern NSW Innovation Hub is currently working on a new proposal to further expand the dashboard into other states and territories, with the plan to come into effect by the end of 2028.
The Early Insights for More Resilient Communities project receives funding from the Australian Government through the Future Drought Fund. It is led by the University of Canberra’s Wellbeing and Resilience Unit with project partners including Southern NSW Innovation Hub, Northern Hub, South-West WA Hub, TAS Farm Innovation Hub, and Vic Hub.
