Supporting mental health through building resilience during and after bushfires: lessons from the 2019-20 bushfires in southern NSW and the ACT

This Stream 2 project will improve individual and collective bushfire preparedness and response through examinng which types of individual, social and community-scale resilience resources available to fire affected individuals and communities, including preparedness and response actions during and post-bushfires, most strongly predict (a) positive coping during bushfire and (b) positive recovery in which there is growth in resilience resources (including individual and community adaptive capacity) that protect mental health and improve preparedness for future events. Resilience resources means access to natural and build environment, cultural, social, economic, legal, and political resources at individual, household and community scale: resilience resources are recognised as critical to maintaining mental health during and after disasters, yet remain under-studied, with limited understanding of which are most important for mental health at different stages of disaster cycles (Paton & Buergelt 2019; Buergelt & Paton 2014). Our mixed methods study will identify and assess the complexity and dynamics of the cumulative impacts of the unique 2019-20 bushfire event, reflecting emerging evidence of the importance of evaluating cumulative impacts when studying complex events (e.g. Loxton et al. 2013, Lowe et al. 2019, Liddell et al. 2020). In this context, this includes impacts of drought preceding the fires as well as cumulative impacts of the fires (e.g. Hanigan et al. 2018).