New online - March 2020

This month, several new CRC research reports and journal articles have become available on the website.

CRC reports

The report for the CRC Tactical Research Fund project Re-imagining program evaluation for community resilience outcomes was written by Dr Melissa Parsons (University of New England) and Dr Holly Foster (Emergency Management Victoria). This report is a self-reflective guide for taking program evaluation for disaster resilience outwards to examine progress and tracking towards the goals of disaster resilience. 

Dr Josh Whittaker, Dr Katharine Haynes and Carrie Wilkinson from the University of Wollongong and Dr Matalena Tofa and A/Prof Mel Taylor from Macquarie University have written a report for the CRC commissioned research project 2018 Reedy Swamp fire post-incident task force. The themes covered in this research are community understanding of fire risk, planning, preparation, and responses during and after the Reedy Swamp fire that displaced approximately 700 residents as well as unknown number of tourists and visitors to Tathra in 2018. This research was conducted for the NSW Rural Fire Service.

A report for the CRC project Cost-effective mitigation strategy for building related earthquake risk has been written by Dr Elisa Lumantarna and Prof Nelson Lam from the University of Melbourne and Dr Hing Ho Tsang, Prof Emad Gad and Prof John Wilson from Swinburne University of Technology. The study presents the vulnerability curves for reinforced concrete buildings presented in terms of damage factor, which is the ratio of the repair cost to the replacement cost for the buildings. A progress report was also written for the project by Dr Hyuek Ryu, Martin Wehner and Mark Edwards from Geoscience Australia and Dr Itismita Mohanty from the University of Canberra.

Adj Prof Jeremy Russel-Smith, Kamaljit Sangha and Dr Andrew Edwards from Charles Darwin University (CDU) have written a report for the Tools supporting fire management in northern Australia CRC project. The report summarises the work undertaken to date in the two main components of CDU’s northern hub scenario planning for remote community risk management in northern Australia project. This includes a framework for the Fire and Emergency Services agencies to engage with remote Indigenous communities and a program of service delivery of land management, monitoring and evaluation tools to assist fire managers.

Journal articles

The journal article Drivers of long-distance spotting during wildfires in south-eastern Australia by Michael Storey, Dr Owen Price and Prof Ross Bradstock from the University of Wollongong and Prof Jason Sharples from the University of New South Wales was published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. The research relates to the CRC student project Empirical analysis of spot fire and ember behaviour during extreme fire weather and analyses the influence of wildfire area, topography, fuel, surface weather and upper-level weather conditions on long-distance spotting during wildfires.  

Peter Hayes and A/Prof Chris Bearman and Peter Bremner from CQUniversity and Mark Thomason from the South Australia Country Fire Service, researchers on the CRC project Improving decision-making in complex multi-team environments published the paper Staying on task: a tool to help state and regional-level emergency management teams in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management. The research describes a checklist-based cognitive aid that can be used by teams to hep retain their focus on tasks that need to be completed.

The paper Unpacking the meaning of resilience: the Tarnagulla community definition comparing to the literature by Dr Mittul Vahanvati from RMIT University was published in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management. The research falls under the CRC student project Post-disaster housing reconstruction as a means of enhancing disaster resilience of at-risk communities in India which examines whether and how participatory owner-driven housing reconstruction projects can lend themselves to long-term disaster resilience of communities in the context of rural India.