QUT Centre for Justice have released a second series of Briefing Papers around the topic of Disaster Justice. The QUT Centre for Justice Briefing Paper Series provides short, accessible, peer-reviewed accounts of topics and issues related to justice.
This second series further showcases the depth and breadth of research from across QUT around disaster justice and highlights some understudied but important topics focused on exploring the human impact of disasters upon individuals, households, communities and public sector agencies.
Papers in this second series include:
- Climate and disaster-related planned relocation: Wellbeing outcomes and justice implications | QUT ePrints – Dr Annah Piggott-McKellar, Jasmine Pearson, Celia Mc Michael and Karen Vella.
Ensuring policies to prevent harmful climate change impacts do not themselves impose significant burdens on populations is a key distributive justice issue related to climate change. Here we unpack this through the adaptation response of ‘planned relocation’ through exploring the wellbeing outcomes on affected populations. We find wellbeing outcomes are often poor, and in particular marginalised populations are most affected. The distributive justice implications of these findings are significant and show that important planning is needed to ensure the burdens of climate change adaptation measures are not themselves further perpetuating existing vulnerabilities for populations.
- Queensland’s response to the 2021-22 floods: Critical reflections on the Resilient Homes Fund | QUT ePrints – Magda Dzienis, HUB Community Legal
Floods are among the costliest disasters in Australia (Dufty et al., 2020), posing significant environmental, social, and legal challenges. This paper examines the strategies implemented to address the repercussions of the 2021–22 Queensland floods and mitigate future flooding impacts. It highlights the value of the Resilient Homes Fund program and practical issues faced by homeowners, as observed by a lawyer from HUB Community Legal, one of the community legal services providing independent and free legal advice to flood-affected communities. The paper also explores potential enhancements to better address the multifaceted impacts of floods and to mitigate escalating socioeconomic inequities driven by the climate crisis.
- Promoting disability justice to reduce climate-induced disaster injustices – Adjunct Associate Professor Julie King, Adjunct Professor Deanna Grant-Smith.
Climate change has accelerated the range, prevalence, and severity of climate-related disasters globally and had a significant impact on most aspects of human health and wellbeing. Climate change is a crisis multiplier and cannot be isolated from the compounding negative consequences created by other vulnerabilities (Levy et al., 2024). The impacts of climate-induced disaster are therefore more severe and complex for people with disability for whom the impacts are compounded by poverty, discrimination and stigma (Spurway & Griffiths, 2016). People with disability are more likely to die due to a disaster (Villenevue, 2022) and experience higher levels of post-event mortality due to health complications arising from insufficient recovery resources (Pledl, 2021). However, the tendency to attribute vulnerability solely to disability overlooks the complex structural contribution of sociopolitical factors such as education, employment status, and poverty to disadvantage and create vulnerability (Lindsay et al., 2022). This briefing paper reflects on prior research in the Solomon Islands (King et al., 2019) to explore how disability justice and climate justice can be integrated to reduce climate-induced disaster injustices.
- Historical roots and future pathways: Centring disaster justice in the Brazilian Amazon forest fires | QUT ePrints, Ariel Sepulveda
Over the past decade, forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon have surged due to deforestation, weak governance, and agribusiness expansion, creating a highly flammable environment. Often portrayed as natural disasters, these fires are not isolated incidents, but rather the culmination of historical, political, and economic factors that have systematically favoured profit over environmental protection. As such events expose existing vulnerabilities, affected communities are left with few resources to adequately recover. This briefing paper addresses how disaster justice can be ensured in such communities and how disaster events can be prevented and managed in the future.
- Disaster justice and the school as a critical social infrastructure – Associate Professor Naomi Barnes
The Australian school system is world class at natural disaster management. Protocols are well thought through, preventative, and responsive should a school be faced with a natural disaster, but there is little on the long-term effects on staff, students, and the local community. Research from Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA), while having a key focus on community resilience or the ability for a community to absorb the impact of a natural disaster, lacks the granularity qualitative research can provide. Current Australian natural hazard research largely ignores the community-wide effect of a disaster from the perspective of the school, nor does it address the possibility of this piece of key community infrastructure for building community capital before, during, and after a disaster. This briefing paper summarises research into the social impact schools have to manage after a natural disaster. This paper highlights the need for Australian research into the social consequences of natural disasters and the key role education research can play.
Read the first and second series of Briefing Papers around Disaster Justice here.
A number of authors of the Disaster Justice Briefing Paper Series will be discussing their research at the upcoming Design for a Just World Symposium on 19th and 20th November 2024 at QUT Kelvin Grove campus – where the intersection of Design and Social Justice will be considered. Read more about this event, and the Disaster Justice panel discussion, here.
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