This year's International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction focuses on resilience at home. It's a useful place to start. Our homes can increase or reduce our exposure to hazards, and what we do before a disaster can make a significant difference to what happens afterwards.
But when we talk about resilience at home, we need to think beyond the physical structure.
A home is where people live, sleep, care for one another, work, study and recover. It's where routines happen, and where people turn to each other when something goes wrong. So when a disaster happens, the impacts don't stop at the front door.
The advice we give households often focuses on the first 72 hours: have an emergency kit, know how to contact one another, have a plan and be ready to leave or shelter safely.
All of this matters.
But for many people, the consequences of a disaster continue for weeks, months or years. A home may be damaged or uninhabitable. Work may be disrupted. Schools and childcare may close. Essential services may be unavailable. Insurance and financial pressures can accumulate. People may lose access to the places, routines and relationships that ordinarily support them.
The hazard may have passed, but the disaster has not.
A house that's still standing doesn't mean life around it is. The school might be closed for months. Local shops may not reopen. Neighbours who would usually help may be dealing with losses of their own.
This is the gap between preparing to survive a disaster and preparing to live through one.
It changes what preparedness needs to look like.
Psychosocial preparedness means having the knowledge, relationships, resources and support to navigate the social, emotional and practical impacts of a disaster, not just in the first few days, but throughout recovery.
And the more honestly we prepare people for what comes next, the clearer something else becomes: people do not recover alone.
The things people need to navigate the aftermath are not things households can always prepare for or provide themselves. They depend on the strength and accessibility of the communities and systems around them.
Households have agency. People can prepare, make decisions, reduce risks and support one another. But that resilience does not exist in isolation. It is shaped by where people live, the infrastructure around them, the services they can access, and the support available before, during and after a disaster.
For some Australians, the ability to prepare for and recover from a disaster is constrained long before a hazard occurs. Telling people to be prepared does not remove those constraints, and household preparedness should not be expected to compensate for them.
This is where our understanding of resilience needs to expand.
In practice, that means having conversations about what could happen after the immediate emergency, and practising plans rather than just writing them down. It means considering how stress, uncertainty and disruption affect the way people make decisions under pressure. It means understanding who may need additional support, and what happens when the usual support networks aren't there either.
But it also means asking a harder question: what are we asking households to be resilient to? If a family is expected to recover from a prolonged loss of housing, income, education, healthcare or connection, then we need to look at the systems that determine whether those things can be restored.
A resilient household cannot compensate indefinitely for systems that are not resilient around it.
This is not an argument against personal responsibility. It's an argument for recognising its limits.
For those of us working in disaster resilience, that distinction matters. We have a role in helping people understand risk, make informed decisions and take action. But we also have a role in shaping the conditions in which those actions can succeed. That should influence what we design, what we fund, what we measure and how we work with communities.
Resilience cannot be created by one sector alone. Emergency management, government, health and social services, community organisations, infrastructure providers and others all influence whether people can withstand disruption and regain stability afterwards.
Resilience at home should not become another responsibility handed to households. It should be the start of a shared conversation.
Because the hazard may have passed, but the disaster has not. And getting through it was never something people were meant to do alone.
The measure of resilience is not whether someone survives the first 72 hours. It's whether the people and systems around them are still there for everything that comes after.
