Published works

There is increasing recognition of the urgency to consider how disaster risk might change into the future, what impacts this is likely to have and, most importantly, what we can do to reduce this risk. There is also increased recognition that in order to achieve this, we need to adopt a holistic approach that takes into account community values, vulnerabilities and resilience, future changes in population and demographics, climate change, multiple hazards, cascading events, adaptation and a range of risk reduction strategies, such as land use planning, community education, land management, structural measures and changes to building codes.

Over the last five years, this project has co-developed conceptual, modelling and decision support frameworks for tackling the above problems in conjunction with more than 40 end-user organisations in four states (South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria). The frameworks facilitate:

• the development of the capacity for strategic thinking and for tackling long term disaster risk in an integrated fashion
• the collaboration between different government departments and different levels of government (federal, state and local)
• the development of a shared understanding of risks and values between a range of stakeholders (e.g. different levels of government and the community)
• the quantification of how disaster risks and costs might change into the future under a range of integrated socio-economic and climate scenarios
• the development of the best adaptive mitigation strategies under these scenarios.

The above frameworks have resulted in the development of the decision support software UNHaRMED (Unified Natural Hazards Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision support system), applications for which have been co-developed with end-users for greater Adelaide, Perth and surrounds, Tasmania and greater and peri-urban Melbourne. In Adelaide, UNHaRMED is being used in collaboration with local governments for strategic flood mitigation planning and the development of a state emergency management exercise focused on recovery and long term mitigation related to sea level rise.

End-user training for the Perth and Tasmania UNHaRMED applications only occurred in 2019 and relevant agencies in these states are working towards the incorporation of these applications in state planning processes. End-user training for the greater and peri-urban application of UNHaRMED will take place in July 2019.

Other opportunities have also presented themselves in working with agencies and providing outputs and insight from UNHaRMED into other projects and products. These have included working with the SA Government on a mitigation exercise which will take place early in the next financial year focused on how to explore future impacts of coastal flooding and develop mitigation activities to be implemented. Another has been working with the National Resilience Taskforce on modelling capabilities for understanding climate and disaster risks.