New online - April 2017

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

The Policies, institutions and governance of natural hazards project has a paper appearing in Environmental Hazards discussing the who, what and how of shared responsibilty. In Australia, the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (NSDR) is the overarching policy framework for disaster risk management and aims to create resilient communities through an emphasis on shared responsibility and empowerment. Through a literature review and document analysis of the NSDR and associated policy documents, the team organises and operationalise the necessarily general policy goal of shared responsibility. They first analyse how the NSDR conceptualises communities to discover which community actors are mentioned, then identify the responsibilities it prescribes or implies for these different actors and consider the types of policy instruments that are relevant to disaster risk management. The analysis reveals a tension between the NSDR’s placement of government at the centre of disaster risk management, and its other, less well-explained emphasis on community empowerment.

Fire, risk mitigation and simulation modelling in Victoria has been covered in a paper published in Environment and Planning. In the paper, the Scientific diversity, scientific uncertainity and risk mitigation policy and planning project draws upon the literature on anticipatory regimes to analyse an in-depth case study of a government pilot in Victoria, where practitioners have utilised a simulation model to measure and intervene in the distribution of bushfire risk. The pilot presents the ‘calculative collective device’ of bushfire management, providing opportunities for practitioners and others to interrogate the existing distribution of hazards and anticipatory interventions.

An open access paper from the Disaster landscape attribution project investigates fire detection from satellite sensors. In Remote Sensing, this study proposes a new method that utilises the common solar budget found at a given latitude in conjunction with an area’s local solar time to aggregate a broad-area training dataset, which can be used to model the expected diurnal temperature cycle of a location. This training data is then used in a temperature fitting process with the measured brightness temperatures in a pixel, and compared to pixel-derived training data and contextual methods of background temperature determination. Results of this study show similar accuracy between clear-sky medium wave infrared upwelling radiation and the diurnal temperature cycle estimation compared to previous methods, with demonstrable improvements in processing time and training data availability. This method can be used in conjunction with brightness temperature thresholds to provide a baseline for upwelling radiation, from which positive thermal anomalies such as fire can be isolated.