New online - June 2020

Plenty of new CRC research is now available through the CRC website, journals and even a brand new book. June’s wrap up has all the details below.

Book chapters

Two Associate students have written chapters for the upcoming book Disasters in Australia and New Zealand: Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe. The book will be launched online Emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) on 2 July 2020 at 6.30 pm AEST.

Delving into immigrant experiences of bushfires, Gretel Evans from the University of Melbourne has authored the chapter Shaped by Fire: How Bushfires Forged Migrant Environmental Understandings and Memories of Place for the new book, referencing her CRC student research project The persistent past: flood, fire and migrant memories of natural disasters in Australia.

Daniel May from the Australian National University also wrote a chapter for the book titled Shallow Fire Literacy Hinders Robust Fire Policy: Black Saturday and Prescribed Burning Debates, drawing on his student project Taking fire: the political and cultural influence of Indigenous burning in settler societies and discussing the relationship between policy, writing and prescribed burning.

CRC reports

Two new reports are available from the Urban planning for natural hazard mitigation project, written by Prof Alan March (University of Melbourne), Dr Leonardo Nogueira de Moraes (University of Melbourne), Dr Graeme Riddell (University of Adelaide), Prof Stephen Dovers (Australian National University), A/Prof Janet Stanley (University of Melbourne), Adj A/Prof Hedwig van Delden (RIKS), Dr Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne) and Prof Holger Maier (University of Adelaide). The first report is an assessment of major Australian post disaster and emergency event inquiries and reviews in terms of recommendations relating to the integration of urban planning and natural hazard mitigation. The second report, a literature review, provides an assessment of the draft Planning and Design Code 2019 and explores integrating bushfire risk reduction and statutory mechanisms in South Australia.

From the University of Sydney, Danica Parnell, A/Prof Tina Bell and Dr Malcolm Possell have released two new reports for the Optimisation of fuel reduction burning regimes project. The first report presents the results of systematically heating and combusting samples of leaves, twigs and bark representing typical surface fuels from forests and woodlands under controlled conditions. The second report provides a summary of the main features of the sites sampled as burn units in the Blue Mountains, NSW to characterise the biomass, carbon and nitrogen held in vegetation/fuel in unburnt and burnt sites.

Prof Mehmet Ulubasoglu and Farah Beaini from Deakin University have authored a new report that explores the impact of the 2010/11 Queensland floods on the income trajectory of employed residents of the four Brisbane River Catchment Area local government areas for the project Optimising post-disaster recovery interventions in Australia. A second report by Prof Ulubasoglu and Yasin Onder (Deakin University) explores the effects of disaster-induced economic shocks transmitted to individuals through income-earning channels during the Black Saturday bushfires. Prof Ulubasoglu also wrote a third report that explores the impact of ex-Tropical Cyclone Oswald 2013 on the incomes of small business owners residing in the four Burnett River Catchment local government areas.

A report written by Dr Fiona McDonald from Victoria University for the Diversity and inclusion: building strength and capability project identifies building resilience with communities as a key focus of diversity and inclusion strategies for emergency management organisations, and highlights the need to develop greater understanding of the specific characteristics, barriers and needs of the communities they serve, and to identify their attributes, capabilities and skills.

CRC PhD student James Furlaud and Prof David Bowman from the University of Tasmania have written a report for the CRC’s quick response project Re-measurement of burnt permanent plots in Tasmanian wet eucalypt forest. The study investigates the effects of fire at 12 permanent plots that burned in the 2019 Tasmanian fires by comparing the predicted and actual fire severity to better understand fuel dynamics in tall wet eucalypt forests.

Steve George, James O'Brien, Salomé Hussein and Jonathan Van Leeuwen from Risk Frontiers were deployed to the NSW South Coast through the CRC’s funding for quick response to survey the bushfire damage that occurred on 31 December 2019 in specified areas due to catastrophic weather conditions intensifying the existing fire fronts. The report summarises the extensive damage to 426 residential and several commercial buildings for the January 2020 NSW bushfires study project.

Dr Barbara Ryan (University of Southern Queensland), A/Prof Kim Johnston (Queensland University of Technology), Prof Maureen Taylor (Sydney University of Technology) and Ryan McAndrew (Queensland University of Technology) have written a literature review for the CRC Tactical Research Fund project Mapping approaches to community engagement for preparedness in Australia. The review collates a list of personal preparedness activities that have been examined for their effect around the world, provides a list of all the community engagement tools and techniques that have been evaluated globally and reviews the success, or otherwise, of these tools in quantifiable terms.

PhD student Andrea Massetti (Monash University) has completed a new report for his project Remote sensing applied to bushfire. Alongside Dr Marta Yebra (Australian National University), Dr James Hilton (CSIRO) and Christoph Rudiger (Monash University), the report outlines a case study in which remote sensing data was used to derive spatial and temporal explicit fuel accumulation curves across defence lands.

Journal articles

The journal article Seismic fragility assessment of non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings in Australia by Dr Anita Amirsardari, Dr Elisa Lumantarna, Pathmanathan Rajeev and A/Prof Helen Goldsworthy from the University of Melbourne was published in the Journal of Earthquake Engineering. The research relates to the CRC project Cost-effective mitigation strategy for building related earthquake risk and suggests that low-rise buildings located on soft sites are the most vulnerable buildings.

Research by Saim Raza, Dr Scott Menegon, Dr Hing Ho Tsang and Prof Joh Wilson from the Swinburne University of Technology was published in the Journal of Earthquake Engineering. The paper Axial load variation of columns in symmetrical RC buildings subject to bidirectional lateral actions in regions of low to moderate seismicity related to both Raza’s PhD project Collapse behaviour of limited ductile high-strength reinforced concrete columns under simulated earthquake loading and the Cost-effective mitigation strategy for building related earthquake risk project, showing that nonsynchronous axial loading results in the lowest collapse drift capacity and energy dissipation of the tested RC columns.

Dr Marla Petal (Save the Children), Prof Kevin Ronan† (CQUniversity), Gary Ovington and Dr Matalena Tofa (Macquarie University), researchers on the  project Child-centred disaster risk reduction published the paper Child-centred risk reduction and school safety: an evidence-based practice framework and roadmap in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The research develops a framework and roadmap to answer the questions of how to best design, develop, evaluate and implement child-centred risk reduction and school safety policies and practices.

The paper Community engagement for disaster preparedness: a systematic literature review by Dr Barbara Ryan (University of Southern Queensland), A/Prof Kim Johnston (Queensland University of Technology), Prof Maureen Taylor (Sydney University of Technology) and Ryan McAndrew (Queensland University of Technology) was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The research is part of the CRC Tactical Research Fund project Mapping approaches to community engagement for preparedness in Australia and reports on the effect of community communication and engagement techniques that have been used in a hazard preparedness context. A/Prof Johnston, Prof Taylor and Dr Ryan published another journal article for the project in the Public Relations Review, titled Emergency management communication: the paradox of the positive in public communication for preparedness. The paper examines an Australian context to understand the types of messages preparing community members for natural hazards.

Mariano Garcia (Universidad de Alcalá), Dr David Riaño (University of California Davis), Dr Marta Yebra (Australian National Univesity), Dr Javier Salas (Universidad de Alcalá), Adrián Cardil (Technosylva), Santiago Monedero (Technosylva), Joaquín Ramirez (Technosylva), Asst. Prof Maria-Pilar Martin (Spanish National Research Council), Lara Vilar (Spanish National Research Council), John Gajardo (Universidad Austral de Chile) and Dr Susan Ustin (University of California Davis) have had their journal article A live fuel moisture content product from Landsat TM satellite time series for implementation in fire behaviour models published in Remote Sensing. The paper presents a two layered Landsat LFMC product based on topographically corrected relative Spectral Indices over a 2000–2011 time series and links to the CRC project Mapping bushfire hazard and impacts.

A journal article by Dr Kamarah Pooley from Queensland University of Technology was published in the Fire Safety Journal The paper, The effect of firefighter-delivered fire safety education on young people who misuse fire, evaluated the NSW Youth Justice Conferencing with firefighter involvement program to ascertain whether firefighter-delivered fire safety education in the context of conferencing reduced the risk of misuse of fire. Dr Pooley completed her CRC PhD in 2018 on An evaluation of Youth Justice Conferencing for youth misuse of fire.