Harden Up - Protecting Queensland: live website

Harden Up - Protecting Queensland is a Green Cross Australia led multi-stakeholder partnership to deploy cutting edge social networking tools and Australia's best climate research to encourage Queenslanders to assess their vulnerability to key natural disaster hazards and to take practical action to become more self-reliant.

The initiative is funded by the Natural Disaster Resilience Program through Emergency Management Australia and the Queensland Department of Community Safety. Green Cross partners include: Local Government Association of Queensland, Insurance Council, Residential Tenancies Aurthority, State Library of Queensland, Suncorp Insurance, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, James Cook University, Channel 10, the Federal Department of Climate Change, the Property Council of Australia and Volunteering Queensland.

Together we are building a world-first disaster resilience portal through which Australia's latest climate data and projections will be visualised by Queenslanders to encourage them to take practical steps to become more self-reliant through major weather events, embracing sustainability and community engagement along the way.

Climate change and population growth combine to present new challenges for Australia's severe weather resilience, testing the effectiveness of traditional emergency response systems. New paradigms that leverage private sector and community engagement are needed in order to encourage self-reliance to growing hazard exposure.

Social media offers the potential for community interaction with accessible scientific trends and practical resilience advice. Green Cross Australia is Australia's leading social media NGO and brings its community/research/business partnership model to address the challenge of improving Queensland' disaster resilience.

Harden Up - Protecting Queensland will build community resilience to severe weather by raising awareness of hazard exposure through a scalable social media platform that encourages Queenslanders to:

1) identify their personal risk exposure to cyclone, bushfire, severe storm and storm surge;

2) take practical actions to reduce hazard exposure;

3) build community resilience by getting involved in local volunteering programs; and

4) adopt sustainable practices, especially by making green choices when recovering from severe weather events.

HardenUp.org's self-reliance message will integrate community natural hazard resilience and climate mitigation objectives, with a focus on how to prepare for, survive through and recover sustainably from major weather events. We will draw on deep resilience and climate prediction expertise and materials of our corporate and research partners.

By enabling world-class visualisation solutions and simple user-driven navigation pathways our platform will create a lasting scalable platform for online community, government, business and research preparedness engagement.

Green Cross Australia is proud to partner with the following organisations to make the HardenUp.org campaign possible.