Nenad has developed an interactive chart and a series of maps to help you see if your community has a demographic vulnerability. This builds on the work described in Glenn’s earlier blog, where we’ve used Census data to identify a series of demographic groups that would be vulnerable in the case of an emergency.
(Jump ahead to the interactive chart)
Councils plan for and want to know where their vulnerable communities are. These plans are not always related to imminent threats or large scale disruptions but when big events do happen and disrupt the community, councils can use knowledge about their vulnerable communities during natural disasters, heat waves or winter blasts, public health emergencies, mass violence, emerging infections diseases and terrorist attacks. Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with many of those here in Australia. One thing is for sure – any one of these events or phenomena will disproportionately affect certain groups in our society.
Identifying vulnerable communities is, unfortunately, not the pre-emptive, hypothetical exercise it was when we first conducted a vulnerable communities analysis with a number of Queensland councils late last year. At that time, this piece of work was completed to form an evidence base for these councils’ emergency response strategies in the event of a natural disaster.
The outbreak of Covid-19 has bought this work into the present. This blog selects seven measures from those we used to define ‘vulnerable people’ in our work and shows the percentage of the population in your Local Government Area that would meet each of the seven criteria.
This basic-level of analysis will help anyone understand which demographic characteristics most contribute to the overall vulnerability of your community. For those councils who have atlas.id, our social atlas tool, you can use that tool to see this data spatially, and identify pockets, or clusters of your community that meet these criteria for ‘vulnerability’.
Stay tuned to our blog for more updates – Glenn will be publishing another tomorrow that looks at the distribution of the more elderly people in our communities, as we know they are among the most at-risk with the spread of Covid-19.
If you work in local government and need assistance identifying vulnerable groups in your community, contact our demographic consulting team here.
In the following series of maps, you can see the spatial distribution of people who are among the most vulnerable – namely, those aged 65+ and the homeless population, by Local Government Area, or Territorial Authority in New Zealand.
