Community Resilience for Islands
Resilience Planning
Five of Shetland’s islands are recognised as Shetland’s islands with small populations. These are Fair Isle, Fetlar, Foula, Skerries and Papa Stour. It is understood that each of these islands has its own unique needs, challenges and strengths and breaking this down and understanding it can be beneficial to addressing and supporting the needs of each islands’ residents. In 2023, the Shetland Partnership approved Shetland’s Second Locality Plan for these islands, and this has been used to inform decision making and seek external funding to support community development.
There have been past concerns about the emergency resilience of these islands. If there was a fire, serious medical emergency or an attack on any of them, emergency responders would need to travel by boat or helicopter to attend to the issue. This can take a significant amount of time, especially if the weather is poor and can result in people being left in life threating situations for extended periods of time. Concerns expressed by islanders resulted in the Shetland Partnership focusing on this. In Spring 2024, it was decided that the Shetland Partnership Management and Leadership team (MLT) would work with each island community, to create resilience plans with support from the Council’s Community Involvement and Development Officer for each island. Representatives of MLT and emergency services visited the islands in person. Being on the island and meeting people in their own environment allowed partners to experience how the islands’ communities work, what they need and what the understanding was around safety and resilience. It allowed them to gain accurate, first-hand accounts of the resilience situation and the islanders could feed back information and ask questions. Some partners also went into schools on the islands to talk to the island’s children. All members were representing the wider partnership and were committed to making sure that if there were any questions they couldn’t answer, they would get that information from those that could and feed it back to the island communities.
Figuring out where to begin and what to do was not difficult; it was an organic process of looking at what each island had, what they were not set up for and where there was less knowledge in relation to emergencies. The pre-existing issues logs were the starting point for approaching the islands resilience.
When creating the resilience plans, it was important to first provide skills and information to the residents. A large part of the resilience planning was preventative work and the islanders needed to be aware of everyday hazards and have in place standard safety measures. Given the remote/very remote locations of the islands and challenging logistics required to respond to an emergency the SFRS in conjunction with partners are exploring island specific safety advice to residents. This will focus on individuals or households needs and put additional awareness, support and training in place to ensure we reduce the potential for an emergency and build personal resilience to some of the UK's most remote communities.
The plans are not yet complete but there has already been positive responses and outcomes as a result of engaging with the island communities. In Foula, for example, the fire service was able to visit people’s homes and fit smoke detectors in buildings. Overall, it is important that the partnership does not over commit to what can be achieved when creating the plans but they must make sure they create something that is effective, safe and sustainable for both the island communities and the services.