New online - February 2021

The latest CRC research, including new final project reports and journal articles, is now available on the website. Read all the details in February’s summary below.

CRC final reports

With the Flood risk communication project now complete, the final report is now available, written by Macquarie University’s A/Prof Mel Taylor and Dr Matalena Tofa, and Dr Katharine Haynes (University of Wollongong). This project focused on the two behaviours most frequently associated with flood fatalities: driving into floodwater in a motor vehicle, and recreating in floodwater. As the project comprised a number of studies it generated a substantial number of findings and insights, which have been condensed into a series of practitioner-focused Research into Practice briefs and a series of short videos to showcase key research findings and augment the briefs. Based on the research findings, the project team have led the co-development of National Community Service Announcements for flood with AIDR, the ABC and AFAC. Survey tools and findings about how people behave, perceive risks, and make decisions around floodwater were developed through this project and the research findings can be used to inform more targeted communications and safety-related training. The survey tools themselves can be used as an engagement tool both with communities and SES personnel. Surveys with SES personnel about entering floodwater included evaluation of organisational safety climate as well as risk taking behaviour, and the data provides a baseline against which a number of SES jurisdictions could evaluate work health and safety improvements and the effectiveness of a range of safety interventions.

The Improving land dryness measures and forecasts project has been completed and Dr Vinod Kumar, Dr Imtiaz Dharssi and Paul Fox-Hughes from the Bureau of Meteorology have written the final project report, Mitigating the effects of severe fire, floods and heatwaves through the improvements of land dryness measures and forecasts. This project examined the use of detailed land surface models, satellite measurements and ground-based observations for the monitoring and prediction of landscape dryness. The research team developed a standalone prototype land surface modelling system, called Joint UK Land Environment Simulator based Australian Soil Moisture Information (JASMIN) to produce daily soil moisture analyses at 5km resolution and 4 soil layers. Verification against ground-based soil moisture observations shows that this prototype system is significantly more skilful than both the Keetch–Byram Drought Index and Soil Dryness Index. This project also aimed to improve applications such as fire danger mapping that may require soil moisture information at higher spatial resolution due to the large spatial variability of soil moisture in the landscape, and developed a simple yet skilful model to predict live fuel moisture content for the whole of Australia.

Book chapters

Dr Katharine Haynes (University of Wollongong), Dr Matalena Tofa (Macquarie University) and Joshua McLaren (NSW RFS) have written a chapter a new book, Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects, published in December 2020 by Routledge. Relating to the Community attitudes and experiences of the 2019/20 NSW bushfire season project, Chapter 12 – called Sensing bushfire: Exploring shifting perspectives as hazard moves through the landscape – explores interviews with residents who had recently experienced a bushfire in Tathra. The interviews contain rich details of the sounds of the wind and fire and the smell of smoke inter alia that constitute embodied and sensory engagements with the bushfire. The chapter focuses on these bodily experiences to rethink the mobilities of people, boundaries and hazard ‘events’, and suggests that a focus on sensory experiences of hazards provides a fuller understanding of more-than-human (im)mobilities and the continual becoming of place.

Journal articles

Relating to the Hazards, culture and Indigenous communities project is research by Dr Will Smith (Deakin University), Dr Timothy Neale (Deakin University) and Dr Jessica Weir (Western Sydney University) published in Geoforum. Persuasion without policies: The work of reviving Indigenous peoples’ fire management in southern Australia explores the potential of Indigenous fire management to achieve broader institutionalisation, emphasising the social labour involved in producing and sustaining intercultural collaboration in bureaucratic contexts. The focus of the paper is southern Australia where Indigenous peoples' fire management, often termed 'cultural burning', has been facilitated by an Indigenous-led social movement and growing state support.

A/Prof Amisha Mehta (QUT), Scott Murray, Cindy Hammill, Dr Paula Dootson and Rebecca Langdon from the Queensland University of Technology have written the paper Checks and balances: A business‐oriented lens on disaster management and warnings for the journal Disasters. Relating to research from the Effective risk and warning communication during natural hazards project, the paper presents a two‐phased, mixed method approach to overcome the research record's focus on policy favoured towards disaster mitigation rather than response. Through interviews and an onlime survey, the study revealed that planning related to experience and knowledge but not to business‐related protective action intentions, and modified messages were perceived as more effective and resulted in greater action intentions for those with bushfire experience.

Published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction is the paper Integrating wildfire risk management and spatial planning – A historical review of two Australian planning systems written by associate students Constanza Gonzalez Mathiesen (University of Melbourne) and Simone Ruane (Curtin University) with Prof Alan March (University of Melbourne). Drawing on research from the Urban planning for natural hazard mitigation project, Constanza’s student project, Urban planning and resilience to bushfires, and Simone’s student project, Planning for bushfire risk at the urban bushland interface: A local adaptive governance approach, the paper examines how Australian spatial planning institutions and instruments have evolved since European settlement to incorporate wildfire considerations, through a qualitative comparative case study approach of two Australian states. Based on the findings of the case study comparison, this paper presents a conceptual framework of the pathways towards increased policy integration of spatial planning and wildfire risk reduction that consists of six phases.

Modulating influence of drought on the synergy between heatwaves and dead fine fuel moisture content of bushfire fuels in the Southeast Australian region was written by Jyoteeshkumar Reddy, Prof Jason Sharples, Sophie Lewis and Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and published in Weather and Climate Extremes. Relating to the Fire coalescence and mass spotfire dynamics project, the paper focuses on the relationship between heatwaves and bushfire fuels by considering dead fine fuel moisture content, a critical factor that regulates the intensity, spread rate and the likelihood of profuse spotting of fires. The relationship is investigated by exploring the statistical correlations between various heatwave characteristics (frequency, duration, magnitude, and amplitude) and mean dead fine fuel moisture content over southeast Australia in the peak heat and fire season.

 Another journal article relating to the Fire coalescence and mass spotfire dynamics project, and also the Fire spread prediction across fuel types project, is A response to comments of Cruz et al. on: ‘Simulation study of grass fire using a physics-based model: striving towards numerical rigour and the effect of grass height on the rate of spread’ by Dr Duncan Sutherland (UNSW), Prof Jason Sharples (UNSW), William Mell (US Forest Service) and A/Prof Khalid Moinuddin (Victoria University). Published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, the paper responds to Cruzet et al. (2020) and clarifies the authors’ commitment to further  research into the mechanisms that drive fire spread in grassland fuels, and their openness to making the most of synergies that exist between various programs of research.