As extreme heat grips large parts of Australia this week, the time for preparation is now, not when flames are visible or evacuation orders sound. The communities that survive disasters aren’t the ones with the best emergency services. They’re the ones that have built resilience before crisis strikes.
I know this from experience. My village of Cobargo on the New South Wales south coast was devastated during the black summer fires six years ago. Recently, at the SXSW conference in Sydney, I swapped experiences with Tim Cadogan, a first responder and the CEO of GoFundMe, who lost most of his home town of Altadena, California in the Los Angeles wildfires in January last year. Though thousands of miles apart, we are learning that strong recovery needs a level of community connectedness established long before crisis strikes.
Here in Cobargo, we’re in preparation mode again. Hoses are rolled out. Fire pumps have been tested. Water tanks are filling. Go bags are packed and by the door. We’ve reviewed our evacuation plan with neighbours, charged batteries and prepped our 2-way radios that allow us to communicate when the network goes out. This is our rhythm now, the practical work of getting ready.
But these individual preparations only work because of what we have built together as a community after black summer. And this is the paradox of disaster preparedness that nobody talks about: you can’t build community resilience during a crisis. You can only activate what’s already there.
The prevailing narrative around disaster preparedness focuses on individual action: stockpile water, have an evacuation plan, clear your gutters. These matter. But they’re not what determines whether a community survives intact or fractures under pressure.
In Cobargo, what saved us wasn’t just physical infrastructure – it was social infrastructure. The links with our neighbours, the folk festival we’d been running for years with networks spanning the region. The cricket club, the Show Society, the P&C associations, the rural fire brigade, the surf lifesaving club – community organisations that provided the connective tissue that held us together when everything else was being torn apart.
The hard truth is that climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe. And if you think this is only a problem for remote rural communities, look again.
Altadena isn’t a remote village. It’s part of greater Los Angeles, home to 42,000 people on the urban fringe. The January 2025 fires didn’t respect the boundary between bush and suburb. They consumed neighbourhoods just minutes from major urban centres, destroying 13,000 homes in communities that many residents assumed were safely removed from wildfire risk.
From flooding in Brisbane’s inner suburbs to heatwaves in western Sydney and storm surges in coastal regions, climate disasters are increasingly urban threats. Yet urban and suburban communities often lack the very attributes that help remote areas survive: strong social infrastructure. In cities, we’re surrounded by people but don’t always know our neighbours. We have more services but often less community cohesion. This makes us more vulnerable, not less, when disaster strikes.
Real preparedness is indeed about clearing gutters, having an evacuation plan, passport and birth certificates in hand, and enough bottled water. But it is also about having neighbours you can call at 2am. It’s about local organisations with the trust and capacity to support emergency response, coordinate immediate relief and manage long-haul recovery. It’s about communities that have longstanding habits of shared decision-making before those decisions become life-or-death.
After black summer, Cobargo made a deliberate choice. Rather than just rebuild what was lost, we invested in strengthening the connections that would help us withstand the next crisis. We funded projects that brought people together. We created systems for collective decision-making. We have built networks of neighbours at the fire edge who prep together.
We are investing in town-scale resilience. We have installed solar and battery power systems on our community buildings so they can operate when the grid goes down. We want to build a village microgrid that can maintain power, even in the event of a prolonged grid outage as happened in 2019. The 210,000-litre water storage tanks we purchased for our rural fire brigade are about ensuring our community has the resources to protect itself. When the fires came in 2019, we had no power or water. We won’t make that mistake again.
Governments play a crucial role in providing support at scale, whether it be physical infrastructure, emergency services or institutional support. But policy must recognise that community resilience can’t be imposed from above. It grows from the ground up, through the steady, unseen work of neighbours helping neighbours, local organisations building capacity, and communities practising solidarity in ordinary times so it’s there in extraordinary ones.
As we face down the threat of bushfires once again, some communities will emerge stronger because they invested in themselves before any crisis struck. This is true whether you’re in a small town or a sprawling suburb. The principles of community resilience don’t change based on population density.
The next disaster is coming. The question is: will your community be ready? Not because you have the right supplies, but because you have the right connections. Not because you have a plan, but because you have one another.
Start building that now. Before the next catastrophic fire day. Before the next flood warning. Before it’s too late.
Zena Armstrong is a Cobargo resident, director of the Cobargo folk festival and founding member of the Cobargo Community Bushfire Recovery Fund
