Energy Ready Toolkit

As the climate crisis intensifies, bushfires, floods, cyclones and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe. Communities confronting this new reality face the urgent and daunting challenge of building resilient and flexible power systems and rethinking their relationship with energy. Energy infrastructure, emergency management and climate adaptation are complex topics that can be overwhelming and distressing, particularly when revisiting or imagining experiences of disasters. Moreover, energy network providers and government agencies often fail to adequately support communities or give them a voice in decision making. The result is that everyday people are left feeling afraid, unheard and unable to act.

The Energy Ready toolkit supports communities to adapt their energy systems to meet the challenges of a changing climate. Drawing on the experiences and insights of communities from across Australia, Energy Ready is a practical resource focused on helping communities harness their unique strengths and knowledge to define their own priorities for energy resilience and adaptation. Responding to natural disasters is an opportunity to reimagine relationships with energy. Energy Ready not only supports communities to respond to the hazards they face but also helps them realise a vision for an energy future where they will not only survive, but thrive.

Energy Ready supports everyday people to respond to the climate crisis and take charge of their energy future. By providing a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing, Energy Ready builds social cohesion and strengthens community bonds while supporting people to build resilient, sustainable energy systems. Its emphasis on including diverse voices encourages comprehensive and equitable planning. It is also a valuable tool for governments, energy providers and emergency management agencies to build stronger relationships with the people they serve. Overall, the toolkit’s impact extends beyond energy resilience, creating empowered and connected communities ready to tackle broader social and environmental issues.

Energy Ready is dedicated to addressing the needs and concerns of everyday people seeking to protect and strengthen their local community. To gain a deeper understanding of these challenges, the project team conducted workshops with six communities from across Australia: Magnetic Island, Mullumbimby, Gympie, Lake Macquarie, Gippsland and Mornington Peninsula. These conversations revealed a key insight: there are shared goals and challenges on the path to energy resilience, but every community’s journey is unique. In response, the Energy Ready toolkit provides an accessible framework for resilience planning that is flexible and adaptable to each community’s context, no matter where they are on their journey. The Energy Ready toolkit contains a guidebook and materials for seven workshop activities. It encourages workshop facilitators and participants to think beyond technologies and infrastructure and consider the social and cultural dimensions of resilience that are essential for success, such as a community’s unique values, character and strengths. The activities also encourage participants to expand their focus from reacting to hazards to proactively building a vision for the future. This holistic approach allows communities to not only cope with, but genuinely adapt to, a changing climate.