Building resilient communities in the high north – A mapping project

This project was funded by NordPlus under the Nordic Council. Meetings with partners in the Faroe Islands and Greenland identified a clear need to map local communities’ ability in the high north ability to respond to catastrophic events. By mapping existing capabilities, we aim to utilise adult training workshops to better understand community resilience and improve how critical events impact villages or towns in the high north. The workshops use existing local competencies and resources to map how the communities can utilise existing research and use local knowledge to strengthen resilience and possible gaps that need to be bridged. Over one year, a series of workshops in Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Denmark invite representatives with in-depth local knowledge of the high-north, emergency response management, policing and organising to discuss and formulate strategies to increase resilience. The starting workshop in Copenhagen establishes a baseline on community resilience by providing input from researchers working on community resilience. Using our theoretical knowledge, we plan four workshops in Greenland and the Faroe Islands to map adult learning in community resilience when applied to the high north. The workshops themselves will be part training, exercises and discussions and will take three days each. Policymakers, community heads and emergency preparedness professionals will use the output to expand their knowledge of the practical implementation of resilience research and increase their ability to muster an effective response in the communities involved. The final report describes lessons learned and a training program that can be used by the partners or decimated through train-the-trainer programs.

The project works to create a toolbox for conducting small scale exercises in remote communities in Greenland and the Faroe Islands to improve local robustness and resilience towards catastrophic events.

The aim is to map our understanding of community resilience to catastrophic incidents in Greenland and the Faroe Islands through scenario exercises and workshops to enhance situational awareness. Through the mapping project, we seek to improve our understanding of the currently available learning tools on organisational resilience when applied to a context that significantly differs from our knowledge of communities who are logistically well connected to national emergency response infrastructure. By completing the project, the partners seek to achieve three aims. Firstly, to enhance the resilience of the participating communities through scenario-based workshops. Two in Greenland and two in the Faroe Islands. Secondly, we will map how adult learning can enhance communities’ capacity to withstand catastrophic events by developing a concrete training package that can be rolled out in a later project. Thirdly the project provides decision-makers with an understanding of how to improve organisational resilience in the high north.