New online - September 2019

New research reports from several CRC projects have been released online.

CRC 2018-2019 annual reports

The annual reports from these CRC projects are now available online;

Economics of natural hazards – by Dr Veronique Florec, Dr Abbie Rogers, A/Prof Atakelty Hailu and Prof David Pannell – this project is addressing issues of cost-effective disaster and emergency management in regard to natural hazards, and determining if the benefits outweigh the cost.

Mapping bushfire hazards and impacts – by Dr Marta Yebra, Prof Albert van Dijk, A/Prof Geoff Cary, Li Zhao and Honghao Zeng – this project is producing spatial information on fire hazard and impacts needed by planners, land managers and emergency services to manage fire at landscape scales.

Factors affecting long-term community recovery – by Prof Lisa Gibbs, Phoebe Quinn, Prof David Johnston, Dr Denise Blake, Emily Campbell and Kate Brady – this project is assessing the research relating to the long term recover of communities after a disaster.

Flood risk communication – by Dr Mel Taylor, Dr Katharine Haynes and Dr Matalena Tofa – this project is developing an understanding of the motivations, beliefs, decision making processes and information needs of at-risk groups for flood fatalities. 

Threshold conditions for extreme fire behaviour – by Dr Alex Filkov, Dr Thomas Duff and A/Prof Trent Penman – this project is identifying the thresholds beyond which dynamic fire behaviour becomes a dominant factor, the effects that these dynamic effects have on the overall power output of a fire, and the impacts that such dynamic effects have on fire severity.

Improving land dryness measures and forecasts – by Dr Vinod Kumar, Paul Fox-Hughes and Dr Imtiaz Dharssi – this project is conducting research in how to better use land dryness as an accurate forecast for bushfires, developing the high-resolution soil-moisture analysis system JASMIN.

CRC reports

A landmark CRC study has been released in conjunction with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) and AFAC. The project, A strategic analysis of preventable residential fire fatalities was funded by the Tactical Research Fund and was conducted by Macquarie University, Risk Frontiers and the MFB. The report looks in depth at who is most at risk from residential fires. It provides fire services with an analysis of preventable residential fire fatalities to inform evidence-based policy and practice to reduce the number of future deaths.

As part of a new commissioned research project by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC titled The value of natural disaster research, a literature review has been published on the economics behind natural disasters, authored by Dr Ken Strahan, Dr Adriana Keating and Prof John Handmer.

Journal articles

A recent journal article by CRC researcher Dr Marta Yebra from the Mapping bushfire hazards and impacts project has been published in Science Data, an open access peer-reviewed journal of the prestigious Nature Research. Authored by Dr Yebra, Gianluca Scortechini, Abdulbaset Badi, María Eugenia Beget, Matthias M. Boer, Ross Bradstock, Emilio Chuvieco, F. Mark Danson, Philip Dennison, Victor Resco de Dios, Carlos M. Di Bella, Greg Forsyth, Philip Frost, Mariano Garcia, Abdelaziz Hamdi, Binbin He, Matt Jolly, Tineke Kraaij, M. Pilar Martín, Florent Mouillot, Glenn Newnham, Rachael H. Nolan, Grazia Pellizzaro, Yi Qi, Xingwen Quan, David Riaño, Dar Roberts, Momadou Sow and Susan Ustin, the paper details a global database that has been developed that  live fuel moisture content measured from 1,383 sampling sites in 11 countries.