New research has begun that explores important issues arising from Australia’s devastating 2019/20 Black Summer. Photo: NSW Rural Fire Service.
New research has begun that explores important issues arising from Australia’s devastating 2019/20 Black Summer. Focusing on research projects to be completed by June 2021, the new suite of research projects is backed by the first $2 million of $88.1 million announced by the Commonwealth Government for more natural hazard research, with additional funding from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC.
In response to the devastation of the 2019/20 bushfires, this research will cover many important aspects across three themes – understanding the extreme fire behaviour and what contributed to it; integration of cultural land management practices into fire prevention; and community engagement, participation and behaviour. Importantly, the new suite of research projects builds on what has already been learnt through the CRC’s previous work and other research programs, while also addressing new issues that arose during Black Summer. Each project will take a different approach to understanding what happened in 2019/20 – some from a state perspective and some from a national perspective – which will enable emergency services and governments to learn lessons from Black Summer, to help reduce the devastating impact of bushfires in future fire seasons.
“This research is really about landscape, people and culture,” said Dr John Bates, Research Director at the CRC.
“We are bringing together a range of expertise across different scientific disciplines to find ways to either improve existing or develop new knowledge that fills crucial gaps in how we prepare for, respond to and recover from bushfires and other natural hazards, so that we can create a safer Australia for everyone.”
There are three research areas and objectives, based on existing knowledge gaps:
Fire predictive services – to boost situational awareness before and during bushfires, and to enhance the sharing of risk information and warnings with communities.
Cultural land management – to better integrate cultural land management knowledge and practices with government-led risk reduction programs.
Community-led recovery – to assist governments in enabling effective and efficient community participation and leadership in disaster preparation, relief and recovery.
Each of these research objectives were established by the CRC in consultation with its partners, including emergency and land management agencies, Indigenous groups and researchers across the country. These groups have been working together to understand the knowledge gaps, utilisation potential and to determine which research projects would meet the needs of the emergency management sector as a whole.
The new research portfolio continues the highly successful collaboration between the CRC and its partners, and seeks to answer important questions based on the experiences and observations from the Black Summer. What improvements can we make to the use of data and technology tools to help us predict and fight fires in future? How can the northern and southern areas learn from each other and from Traditional Owners to improve fire and land management? How can governments leverage existing and emerging community organisations and networks in post-disaster recovery to improve community resilience?
“Bushfires are complex and ever-evolving hazards. This research explores some of the many contributing factors and how they work together. It’s not just about allocating more aircraft or improving the technology that spots new fires. It’s also about seeing how all these factors interact with each other so we can develop a more rounded understanding of extreme fires and how to minimise their impact on society and the environment,” Dr Bates said.
The next eight months of research will address the key concepts of these important questions with a view to providing insight, data and knowledge which can be further developed in the new national research centre.
Fire predictive services This research stream will include projects that explore a national assessment of Black Summer fires, as well as projects that focus on specific fires in different landscapes and geographical areas – Badja Forest in NSW, Corryong in Victoria, Kangaroo Island in SA, Yanchep in WA and Stanthorpe in Qld. An overarching objective of this research stream is to understand what additional data can be provided to emergency agencies to help them predict and respond to bushfires in future. This information is also expected to provide new information to inform communications and warnings messages.
Modelling fire weather interactions: led by Dr Jeff Kepert and Dr Mika Peace at the Bureau of Meteorology, as well as emergency services in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and WA. This research will simulate the five severe bushfires from Black Summer (mentioned above) using the ACCESS-Fire model – a high-resolution model that, due to its complexity, is not able to be run operationally in real time when bushfires are occurring. By looking back and examining these five fires, the research team will be able to better understand why such extreme fire behaviour occurred. This detailed analysis will then feed into the continuous improvement of fire spread models and severe fire weather forecasting.
Understanding moisture in the landscape: led by Paul Fox-Hughes (Bureau of Meteorology) and Dr Marta Yebra (Australian National University), as well as emergency services in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and WA. This research will examine whether existing CRC research on soil and fuel moisture can be further integrated to understand the conditions that led to Black Summer fire behaviour. Researchers will investigate in detail the soil and fuel precursors using the CRC-developed Australian Flammability Monitoring System on the five significant fires (mentioned above) to determine whether predictions of elevated risk of severe fire can be improved in future.
Using earth observations to map accessible water for aerial firefighting: led by Leo Lymburner at Geoscience Australia (GA), alongside the National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC). This research will explore the integration of GA’s Digital Earth Australia with data from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to provide near-real time information about water quantities in, and easy access to, bodies of water near active fire grounds.
Using earth observations to better understand the effects of aerial firefighting: led by Dr Karin Reinke and Prof Simon Jones at RMIT University, alongside NAFC, the NSW Rural Fire Service, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (Vic), and the Country Fire Authority (Vic). Focusing on NSW and Vic, this research will conduct a retrospective analysis using satellite data to better understand the effectiveness of aerial firefighting suppression to aid the constant improvement in how fires are fought from the air.
Bushfire reconstruction data and demonstration projects: comprising several smaller projects across WA, SA, Vic, NSW and Qld, at the five locations mentioned above. Each project will look at a specific bushfire in detail to understand what additional technology or tools are required to understand extreme fire behaviour specific to different geographical areas and vegetation types. These projects will explore needs such as mapping specific vegetation types in certain areas, analysis of the effectiveness of local prescribed burns, improving jurisdictional fire detection technology, identifying ways to automate local data collection and analysis, area-based fire atmosphere modelling, and assessing community behaviour during bushfires.
Cultural land management This research stream will focus on how to learn from and empower Indigenous-led cultural fire and land management agencies across both northern and southern Australian landscapes and how these practices integrate with government-led land management practices. The project will be a partnership between the CRC, Deakin University, Charles Darwin University, Firesticks Alliance, North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance and state and territory fire and land management agencies.
Led by Dr Timothy Neale (Deakin University) and Adj Prof Jeremy Russell-Smith (Charles Darwin University), this research will extend beyond assessments of cultural burning to:
explore opportunities for the integration of cultural and government-led land management practices
identify possible governance arrangements to support the development of cultural land management research, including protection of Indigenous cultural intellectual property
explore ways in which the benefits of cultural land management practices can be appropriately and sensitively measured
build relationships with relevant Indigenous land management organisations, Traditional Owner groups and agencies.
Both Dr Neale and Adj Prof Russell-Smith have been working extensively with Indigenous communities for many years, including Dr Neale’s Hazards, culture and communities CRC research and Adj Prof Russell-Smith’s Enhancing remote north Australian community resilience CRC study – both of which are focused on respectfully understanding the role of Indigenous practices alongside government-led initiatives.
Community-led recovery This research stream will focus on ways that governments can support and enhance community-led bushfire recovery. Led by Prof Lisa Gibbs (University of Melbourne) alongside Bushfire Recovery Victoria, this research aims to examine the ways that governments can better support and enable communities to lead their own recovery after bushfires (and disasters caused by other natural hazards), which is increasingly important in a country that depends on the integration of Federal, State and Local Government approaches when tackling resilience.
This research will explore key questions about community-led bushfire recovery:
How can governments best leverage existing and emerging community organisations, structures and networks in post-disaster bushfire recovery?
How can governments best support community-led decision-making processes in post-disaster bushfire recovery?
This builds on existing research that Prof Gibbs has been conducting through the CRC’s Recovery Capitals project, which explores the enablers and barriers to successful recovery from a community capitals perspective.