Community resilience to and recovery from wildfire in New Zealand

This project will investigate the community factors that influence the capacity for community members to adapt to and recover from wildfire in New Zealand. The initiative the project emerged from a scoping project undertaken by ENSIS which reviewed published literature and informal material on community resilience and recovery following wildfires in Australasia.

The project identified the significant effects that are brought to bear on a community in the aftermath of a fire. Numerous consequences need to be taken into account. Simplistically these can be broken down into four categories: economic, social, physical and psychological changes. They must not be looked at independently from each other, as they are all interconnected through a sense of loss that is common to the people affected.