New online - October 2016

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

The Mapping and understanding bushfire and natural hazard vulnerability and risks at the institutional scale project has two new reports. The purpose of Institutional maps of risk ownership for strategic decision making report is to develop institutional maps of risk ownership in the Australian context that will provide an insight into the current balance of ownership delegations. These maps address risk ownership relating to the strategic management of natural hazard risk for planning, preparedness and recovery. 

The Understanding values at risk and risk ownership workshop synthesis report provides an analysis of four workshops and supporting research for the study. The workshops, undertaken in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and New South Wales were designed to provide a basis for testing work to date and for identifying key components needed for the development of the final outputs for this project. They were designed with end-users to explore preferences in decision-making that relate to values at risk and current understandings of risk ownership, as well as to test the draft values at risk map developed by the project as a research tool, to determine its best future use.

The Out of uniform study has a briefing paper on a proposed framework to assess strategies for engaging non-traditional emergency volunteers. The paper begins with a research-based context and rationale for developing the engagement framework. It then presents the proposed engagement framework itself and briefly outlines a process that is being used between July and December 2016 to test and refine the framework for use by emergency service organisations as an applied decision support tool. The refinement process is centred on a series of interactive workshops with key stakeholder groups to test the framework in an applied setting.

The Optimisation of fuel reduction burning regimes project has assessed applying statistical techniques to pyrolysis coupled to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (pyr-GC-MS). The report investigates whether it was possible to rapidly identify significant differences among pyr-GC-MS data from soil from burnt and unburnt areas using an unsupervised statistical approach and identify the specific features that cause them. Of nearly 400 useful compounds extracted from the pyr-GC-MS data, only 15 were found to be necessary to classify between burnt and unburnt soil. The report discusses how these features could be useful in the classification of soil disturbance such as fire or, potentially, as a quantitative measure of fire impact (intensity or severity).

All annual project reports for 2015-2016 are now available online. Read up on all the research from the following projects: 

• Decision making, team monitoring and organisational learning in emergency management
• Managing animals in disasters
• Connecting communities and resilience
• Improving the role of hazards communication in increasing residents' preparedness
• Out of uniform
• Improving volunteer recruitment and retention
• Improving the resilience of existing housing to severe wind events
• Mapping bushfire hazard and impacts
• Cost-effective mitigation strategy development for flood-prone buildings
• Northern Australian bushfire and natural hazard training
• Cost-effective mitigation strategy development for building-related earthquake risk
• Improving flood forecast skill using remote sensing
• Scoping remote north Australian community resilience and developing governance models through action research
• Savanna fire management and bushfire and natural hazard scenario planning for northern Australia
• Enhancing resilience of critical road infrastructure