New online - August 2016

New journal articles and reports on CRC research are now available online.

Many annual project reports for 2015-2016 are now available online, with more to follow soon. Read up on all the research from the following projects: 

• Decision support system for assessment of policy and planning investment options for optimal natural hazard mitigation
• Disaster landscape attribution: fire surveillance and hazard mapping, data scaling and validation
• Developing better predictions for extreme water levels
• Storm surge: resilience to clustered disaster events on the coast
• From hectares to tailor-made solutions for risk mitigation: systems to deliver effective prescribed burning across Australian ecosystems
• Coupled fire-atmosphere modelling
• Determining threshold conditions for extreme fire behaviour
• Economics of natural hazards

A practice framework is now available from the Child-centred disaster risk reduction project. The framework aims to provide emergency management agencies with a strategic, evidence-based approach to the development of disaster risk education programs that reduce risk, increase resilience and can be implemented at scale. The authors welcome and encourage critical feedback and commentary - download the practice framework. 

The International Journal of Disaster Risk Deduction has published an open access paper by the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index team. The paper presents a conceptual framework using coping and adaptive capacities, with seven common properties that should be considered in the design of any disaster resilience assessment: assessment purpose, top-down or bottom-up assessment, assessment scale, conceptual framework, structural design, indicator selection, data analysis and index computation and reporting and interpretation. 

The latest issue of The Australian Journal of Emergency Management has a number of CRC papers. The paper from the Child-centred disaster risk reduction project summarises developments and emphasises current progress and challenges on disaster resilience education programs. The paper asks how programs that work over time, including during disasters and into adulthood, can be scaled up to reduce risk and increase resilience for children, youth, schools, households and communities?

Also in AJEM is a paper from the Improving the resilence of existing housing to severe winds team, which discusses issues of engagement and reviews literature and existing mitigation programs as background for a smartphone mitigation tool being developed in Queensland and Florida.

The final AJEM paper covers the work of the Improving flood forecast skill using remote sensing data project. WIth flooding costing Australia millions of dollars each year, the research is testing a new approach to flood forecasting using satellite technology, which could help communities prepare for and deal with floods.

PhD student Roozbeh Hasanzadeh Nafari has had a free open access paper published in Water. An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Tree-Based Models for Multi-Variate Flood Damage Assessment in Australia explores the interaction, importance, and influence of water depth, flow velocity, water contamination, precautionary measures, emergency measures, flood experience, floor area, building value, building quality and socioeconomic status using data from the 2012 and 2013 Queensland floods. The tree-based approaches show water depth, floor area, precautionary measures, building value, and building quality to be important damage-influencing parameters.