Mitigating disasters: the inconvenient truth

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2016 edition of Fire Australia magazine. By Dr Richard Thornton, Chief Executive Officer, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. 

During the past bushfire season, public commentary focused on how major bushfires were managed in several states. Were warnings adequate and who knew what and when?

In some parts of the country, the fires came early (Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia), in others it was floods (New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory) and severe storms battered Queensland and NSW.

Lives and properties were lost in many of these events, which is tragic. What is doubly tragic is the mounting cost of response and importantly recovery, because in that one word – recovery – lies the heartache of loss and destruction.

There is growing research highlighting an increase in social problems following a disaster, including increased alcohol consumption, an increase in domestic violence, and a greater incidence of suicide. 

The federal government’s Productivity Commission, in its inquiry into disaster funding arrangements in May 2015, made strong recommendations that the focus for emergency management had to switch to mitigation. Mitigation is always a better option, as not only does it ultimately reduce the dollar costs, it also reduces misery and suffering following the disaster. But what does this mean in practice? 

For bushfire, this clearly means mitigating the intensity of fire through the use of fuel reduction on public and private land, with communities and officials accepting the risks and inconveniences of fire during autumn and spring.

There is a need to maintain the right amount of land burnt before fuel loads get to levels that makes future management difficult. Commentators say that not enough controlled burning is being done in some jurisdictions.

For cyclone and flood, this means mitigating wind and water damage through the construction of better infrastructure such as dams, levees or community cyclone shelters. For homeowners, this means better building and rebuilding of homes, and ensuring that existing houses have simple and cost-effective mitigation measures. 

To illustrate the point, a recent study by Suncorp, Urbis, The Green Cross and The Cyclone Testing Station at James Cook University found that 86 per cent of claims in 2011’s Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi were for minor damage, which could have been easily and cheaply prevented.

It was shown that some roof upgrades to older houses could pay for themselves after just one cyclone. This is why a focus on retrofit options for existing households is such a cost effective approach to dealing with various hazard types.

We must question whether building in some areas is wise. It may be best not to rebuild in some areas because the risk is unacceptably high. 

There is a critical need for discussion around land-use planning and land management, and how and where we develop new areas with roads, bridges and other infrastructure. This is crucial in the renewed push to open northern Australia.

The bottom line here is that all Australians need to accept and understand that we live in a country where natural perils exist and that the management actions required to maintain our comfortable lives are sometimes inconvenient and come with their own risks and costs.

Better understanding the consequences of our actions, and importantly inactions, will be a critical part of this.

Increased levels of smoke and the risk of escape from greater prescribed burning, increased planning controls and enforcement, and increased personal costs of compliance, will have to be part of our way of life if we are truly to meet the desired outcomes of increased mitigation. 

One challenge here is that there is evidence that there is little political capital to be gained from mitigation.

In fact, research from the United States shows that it could be politically damaging; there is no photo opportunity, and all we see is the cost of the mitigation action itself. We do not see the savings from all the events that did not happen. We can only see the payback from our expenditure in future trendlines that are only weakly correlated to the specific actions. 

As the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, stated in 1999: "Building a culture of prevention is not easy. While the costs of prevention have to be paid in the present, its benefits lie in a distant future. Moreover, the benefits are not tangible; they are the disasters that did not happen."

To reduce the pain, suffering and cost, we all need to commit to a mitigation approach and accept the risks and to stop the blame game when things go wrong or are inconvenient.