Research driven by real world needs

For the last eight years, the main priority of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC has been to provide useful, high quality, needs-based research through partnerships with universities, emergency service agencies, international research organisations, government departments and non-government groups. The aim is to drive changes in the way Australia prepares for, manages and responds to natural hazards.

To distill and make sense of the plethora of research that has been completed at the CRC since 2013, the CRC website has been enhanced to ensure that the research project outputs – which are all now being finalised – can be used as effectively as possible by its partners and the community.

The CRC has created Driving Change – an online resource that collects and curates the best and latest research from across the eight years of the CRC’s research program.

“Driving Change provides the all-important first steps into using the project outputs with overviews and many great examples of utilisation, all linking back to the underpinning research,” said the CRC’s CEO Dr Richard Thornton.

Driving Change highlights the CRC’s partnerships by collecting and presenting all research into 10 themes according to how the research is now being used by emergency services, government and the community.

The 10 themes are disaster resilience; economics, mitigation and value; education and communications; extreme weather; fire predictive services; future workforce; Indigenous initiatives; infrastructure and impact; managing the landscape; and policy, political engagement and influence.

Each Driving Change theme page is a presentation of the key findings and achievements of CRC research. From those theme pages, visitors to the site are given curated access to online tools, inspiring case studies of research in action, and a selection of the best news, resources and publications, culminating in a collection of all relevant research projects relating to that theme.

No matter which research area users are interested in, they can now easily find and explore the real-world impact of all research relating to that topic. From a selection of key outputs to the full collection, users now have everything they need to know about the vital research of the CRC and how it is driving change at the operational and practical level.

Visitors to the site can also find all the online tools and resources that the CRC has created or contributed to in one place, including:

• the Australian Disaster Resilience Index
• the Australian Exposure Information Platform
• the Australian Flammability Monitoring System
• the Coastal Erosion Story Map
• the Diversity and Inclusion Framework for Emergency Management Policy and Practice
• Extreme Sea Levels in Australia
• the Guide to Post-disaster Recovery Capitals
• the Inquiries and Reviews Database
• the Prescribed Burning Atlas
• the Public Information and Warnings Handbook
• the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Reporting Framework
• Strategic Decision Making Tools
• the Toolkit for Emergency Volunteer Leaders.

CRC Communications Director, David Bruce, writes about the thinking behind the site in his latest blog, including the key gaps that Driving Change is trying to fill for those interested in natural hazard research utilisation.

“If your questions are about what you need to know, where to find it, how to use it or how others are using it, then Driving Change is the place to start,” he said.  

Driving Change highlights the ways that partners have shaped and supported all of the research that the CRC has completed and supports ongoing discussion for the importance of collaborative partner-driven research in future natural hazards research.

You can access the Driving Change section of the CRC website here. All tools are available to use here, and case studies are also collected together here.