Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

189 Government representatives were also considered as representing their community because they lived and worked in the landscape under discussion. Our approach represents an often necessary compromise in consultation with small rural communities between scientific rigor and the need for relevance to stakeholder concerns; establishment of clear links between activity and impact; ability to capture spatial and temporal context; and resonance with the public to represent society’s concerns and aspirations [36]. The workshops were designed to enable a clearer understanding of the South East region’s vulnerability to climate change and to inform the development of strategies that support the community to build landscape and community resilience to extreme climatic events. Workshop Process: Qualitative data were collected during facilitated workshop sessions. Two key activities were conducted during each workshop. The first activity was undertaken as an open plenary discussion that utilised the emergency management cycle—Prevent, Prepare, Respond and Recover (PPRR) to frame participant consideration of the most important local hazards—bushfires, drought, storms and flooding under current climate projections (Figure 5). In particular we sought information about the local, lived experience [37] of extreme climate events throughout the emergency management cycle. This discussion was captured directly into a spreadsheet template and the information projected onto a screen to enable real-time clarification by participants. Figure 4. Location of the South East region in Australia and the locations of workshops in eight regional landscapes.