Natural hazards are becoming more frequent and severe and their impacts often unfold in complex ways, such as power outages, blocked roads and shortages of emergency resources, making them far more than one‑off events.
Traditional command‑and‑control systems can struggle in these fast‑changing situations because they rely on slow, hierarchical communication. As a result, disaster response now often involves more flexible networks that bring together both official emergency services and informal groups, such as community organisations or spontaneous volunteers. While this helps deliver resources quickly, it also creates new communication challenges, especially when people use different systems, terms, or formats to share information. At the same time, disasters generate huge amounts of data that are too complex for humans to process alone. Emerging AI tools offer promise in helping to process this information and improve communication, but research in this area is still limited.
This project aims to understand how AI‑enabled tools could help emergency response networks communicate more effectively about resource deployment during evolving disasters in Australia. It will examine how formal and informal actors work together, how information flows between them, and how these networks change over time. Using methods such as interviews, observations, archival research and social network analysis, the study will identify key strengths, vulnerabilities and bottlenecks in the current system. By exploring how AI and diverse community connections can strengthen adaptability and resilience, the research will provide insights that can inform future policy, planning and long‑term strategies for more effective and equitable disaster response.
