In the recent Sky News and Tortoise Wargame podcast, Rob Johnson and Deborah Haynes asked our communities ‘our enemies know our weaknesses, do you?’. This talk will aim to broaden that question set by using the evidence on societal resilience to ask our leaders, policy makers and decision makers ‘our communities know their strengths, do you?’.

Focusing on evidence to explore how social psychology can inform societal resilience, this talk will outline how communities, responders, decision makers and civil protection structures do not currently take a strengths-based approach, rather than a deficit approach, to societal resilience. It will argue that a whole of society approach is needed to adequately identify, prepare, mitigate, manage, recover and adapt to risks and threats, especially societal wide risks such as homeland defence. Group behaviours, collective action, communication of risk, public narratives, and psychological and social health of communities and responding organisations will all be discussed, as well as the current systems to support societal resilience.

Rowena Hill is a Professor of Resilience, Emergencies and Disaster Science at Nottingham Trent University. Her research and policy work focusses on risk, resilience and wellbeing, applying evidence to inform these constructs at the individual, group, organisation and societal level. Her research tends to focus on societal wide risks and how the public preparedness is influenced by the local, sub-national and national resilience structures and narratives. She works with the emergency services, government departments, local authority level organisations, combined authorities, and the community and voluntary sector to understand how resilience can be coordinated, integrated and implemented through evidence informed practices.