Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

188 sensibly manage vegetation on private land so that over-clearing and “tree hysteria” is limited. The information required to undertake such additional activity may require greater co-operation among combat and natural resource support agencies to formulate local guidance material. Increased social assistance from government that specifically-targets the restoration and maintenance of living green infrastructure, particularly where it has been damaged by recent extreme events and is essential to the ongoing protection of communities (such as dune systems in coastal regions) in order to reduce the potential for loss of resilience (Figure 3). Figure 3. Conceptualization of the potential changes in state of built and natural assets through repeated emergency management cycles. Increased community activity to protect natural resource-dependent livelihoods, which includes action on both public and private land. The availability of social assistance funding for natural resource restoration could be used as a catalyst for this activity, which would not only protect ecosystem services but raise awareness in the community of extreme event preparedness in both Prevent and Prepare phases. These three changes should reduce the level of impairment of natural resource function during the response phase. The form that these additional activities should take needs to be negotiated at landscape scale and be informed by local understanding of the most significant extreme event hazard (e.g., [35] for bush fire). 4. MATERIALS AND METHODS 4.1. Place-Based Participatory Workshops This paper provides a synthesis of the findings from a series of place-based participatory workshops that focused on the management of natural resources for extreme weather events across 8 sub regions of South East NSW, Australia (Figure 4). The workshops were conducted in 2014 with approximately 100 (in total) community members representing farmers, landholders, emergency service volunteers, local and state government, business owners, Indigenous peoples, financial institutions and Non- Government Organisations (Table 1). Participation was through invitation (by the regional NRM agency) and self-selection, provided two basic criteria were met: (1) participants lived in the landscape under discussion (but not necessarily at the workshop location); and, (2) they were widely networked and able to reflect on issues relating to NRM, extreme event management or the community in general. Meeting these criteria offset the limitations imposed by low numbers of participants at some workshops. In addition, because the same type of extreme event was discussed at different locations (with the exception of storm events) there was considerable redundancy in the data with most themes recurring at multiple workshops. Some workshop participants represented a number of different groups, for example, farmers that are also part of community-based NRM groups or that volunteer with the rural fire management service.