Including children in disaster preparedness across regional Australia’s high-risk communities
Background: Regional Australia is experiencing cascading disasters, including droughts, bushfires, and floods. These repeated crises contribute to disaster fatigue, reducing preparedness and decision-making across communities. Children are among the most vulnerable members of society, particularly during emergencies, yet disaster management and risk communication frameworks rarely recognise them as active participants in preparedness. National and state disaster frameworks give little attention to the needs of children and childcare services, which also face limited funding and workforce shortages.
Aim: Research on how children understand and respond to emergency warnings remains scarce. Current approaches heavily rely on parents or caregivers, even though disasters often separate children from adults. This research aims to review the literature on disaster preparedness of children and their ecosystems. Such research is essential to better understand the experiences, knowledge, understanding, and capacities of children living in disaster-prone communities and to inform more inclusive and effective disaster preparedness strategies.
Method/approach: This study employed an integrative literature review methodology. A literature search was conducted using the terms ‘child*’ AND ‘disaster preparedness’ AND ‘Australia’ across the scholarly databases EBSCOhost (74 records), ProQuest (59 records), and Scopus (278 records). The search was limited to publications from 2021 to 2026 (last five years), yielding a total of 411 journal articles and books. After removing duplicate records, 280 publications remained. These were then screened individually for relevance against the study’s inclusion criteria, resulting in a final sample of 35 scholarly works to which selected websites were added.
Results/findings: The review identified educational institutions, such as childcare centres, as critical in disaster preparedness, with evidence highlighting regulation, leadership, communication, training, and community networks as key enablers. However, childcare centres remain largely confined to consultative roles despite policies promoting community engagement. Overall, the review found that existing research predominantly examines children’s broader support systems rather than children’s own perspectives, leaving their voices largely absent from the evidence base.
Conclusion: Collectively, the findings reveal important gaps in both research and policy, highlighting the need to strengthen the inclusion of children’s and childcare educators’ perspectives in emergency management planning and disaster resilience initiatives. The identified gap in children’s voices within disaster preparedness research underscores the need for empirical studies that explore children’s perspectives on preparing for future climate-related crises.
Implications for children and families: The outcomes of the literature review show the need for research that can help children increase agency when separated from families and caregivers in crisis situations and assist parents in supporting their children on this journey.
Implications for practitioners: Practitioners, such as childcare centre directors, should include children’s perspectives in disaster preparation and emergency management to increase their resilience and agency in times of crisis.
Keywords: disaster resilience, disaster preparedness, children, disaster-prone location, regional Australia, cascading disasters, disaster fatigue
This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: