Published works

Investing in mitigation activities before a natural disaster occurs can be very effective in reducing disaster losses. However, there can be a number of obstacles to developing and implementing long term mitigation schemes, including a tendency to invest in works with clearer short-term benefits, and the difficulty in accurately attributing risk and benefits to natural disasters and mitigation options, respectively. Decision support systems (DSSs) can be advantageous in helping overcome these obstacles, because of their analytical capabilities to combine various sources of information and support trade-off analysis. However, DSSs for natural disaster mitigation have so far tended to focus on disaster preparedness and the immediate and post-crisis response to emergencies. Consequently, an integrated natural hazard mitigation DSS is being developed. This DSS will optimise the choice of mitigation options in a multicriteria sense, through assessing the performance of various policy options in the long term. Models will be used to evaluate the performance of mitigation options across a number of natural hazards in an integrated way, whilst taking account of land use and climate change. The system will be developed through participatory processes, involving stakeholders from various organisations responsible for hazard mitigation, to ensure the system addresses the most pertinent issues, as well as the decision making process for hazard mitigation. To test the approach in different contexts, it will be applied to three case studies, the first being Greater Adelaide. This paper introduces the proposed DSS.