Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience

About AIDR

The Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) is the National Institute for disaster risk reduction and resilience. We collaborate across sectors to strengthen the resilience of Australian communities to disasters.

AIDR creates, grows, and supports a range of networks; provides opportunities for learning, development, and innovation; shares knowledge and resources to enable informed decision making and action; and facilitates thought leadership through national conversations.

AIDR contributes to a more disaster resilient Australia through four key influencing strategies that encapsulate AIDR’s work:

Actively supporting, growing and sustaining a range of networks across sectors and jurisdictions.
Enabling those with a role in disaster risk reduction and resilience to come together
to learn, develop and innovate.
Collecting, developing, curating and sharing knowledge to educate and promote good practice in disaster risk reduction and resilience.
Providing a central focus point for national thought leadership on disaster risk reduction and resilience.

For more information, go to AIDR’s Approach and Evaluation.

AIDR's Executive Director

Dr Margaret Moreton
Executive Director
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR)

Margaret is the Executive Director for AIDR and brings to this role significant experience working in the government, non-government, business and the philanthropy sectors. Her career began in federal government, before she undertook community-based research at the Australian National University that identified key factors that contribute to disaster recovery and resilience. Margaret has worked in paid and volunteer roles and has operated her own private consulting business in disaster risk reduction and resilience. Following the 2019-2020 bushfires, she spent time working in philanthropy. Margaret has developed a strong reputation as a disaster resilience specialist, working to build community resilience in partnership with a broad range of stakeholders and led by communities themselves.

Together with her team at AIDR, Margaret is focussed on developing and sharing knowledge, resources, and experience across a range of sectors, to lead or contribute to efforts that enhance community and systemic resilience to natural hazards, across Australia. She has a particular passion for amplifying the voices of diverse groups who have lived experience and significant knowledge and expertise, and have previously been overlooked or not included ‘at the table’. She feels a sense of urgency about disaster risk reduction work, and strongly advocates for partnership approaches, on the basis that urgency, relationship and trust are essential elements of bringing about systemic change.

Our Partnerships

AIDR is a consortium managed by AFAC as a business unit and supported by its partners: the Australian Government and the Australian Red Cross. AIDR delivers a range of products and services on behalf of the Commonwealth Government to support a disaster resilient Australia.

National Emergency Management Agency

The services that AIDR delivers are defined and funded through a contract between the Australian Government and AFAC. A Governance Committee monitors the performance of AIDR in delivering the services defined and funded through the contract, as well as in achieving the outcomes identified in the AIDR Monitoring and Evaluation Plan.

AFAC
AFAC

AFAC, as the national council for fire and emergency services, supports the sector to create safer, more resilient communities. AFAC drives national consistency through collaboration, innovation and partnerships. AFAC delivers enhanced capability by developing doctrine and supporting operations.

Australian Red Cross

Australian Red Cross works to assist individuals, organisations and communities to be resilient and have capacity to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. It supports people to cope with and manage the psychosocial impacts of emergencies. As auxiliary to the public authorities, Red Cross leads and contributes to a wide spectrum of emergency management planning, policy development, capacity building, research, sector coordination and service delivery.

AIDR’s Approach and Evaluation

AIDR's Approach 2021-2025

AIDR's Approach outlines AIDR’s program of work for the next four years, which will span the emergency management continuum of prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. AIDR will influence change by creating, growing, and supporting a range of networks; providing opportunities for learning, capability development, and innovation; sharing knowledge and resources to enable informed decision making and action; and facilitating thought leadership through national conversation.

Download AIDR Approach 2021-2025 (PDF 4MB)

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Plan

AIDR has developed a Monitoring and Evaluation Plan to guide its program of work and to demonstrate AIDR’s impact over the timeframe of this Strategy. The approach is theory driven, with measurement aligned to the Theory of Change model.

Measurement that tracks the delivery of influencing strategies and data will be collected about the activities and outputs across AIDR’s four key influencing strategies.
Strategic learning also occurs across the Theory of Change with different learning questions related to different levels of change.
Evaluation draws on measurement and learning data, and focusses on the effectiveness of the influencing strategies.

Download the AIDR Monitoring and Evaluation Plan (PDF 1.88MB)