Tamara Sysak

The role of social networks in community resilience to climate change in two rural communities in Victoria

Resilience in ecology, and as applied to social systems, has three essential characteristics:

• The amount of change the system can endure while retaining the same function and structure
• The extent to which the system has the capacity to self-organise
• The ability to develop and enhance the capacity for learning and adaptation (Holling 1983).

Through a resilience framework, Tamara will examine the social networks of two rural communities in Victoria, bounded by climate change (fire and drought) information exchange, to investigate how these networks contribute to community resilience.

Tamara’s research falls into the CRC’s Program 4 research area and is related to the INFFER project.

Objectives:

• Investigating through a resilience framework how social networks operate in two rural communities in Victoria
• Determining the structure of the social networks in terms of diversity, modularity, connectivity and tightness of feedback loops
• Looking where the social networks are situated within the subsystems of farm, region and institutional structures and how changes over time have influenced the function and structure of the system.

For more information, email Tamara.