Published works

The economic impacts are often overlooked in management planning as the effects are not immediately felt and instead focus is put onto emergency response systems. In Australia, the disaster management arrangements across all stages (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery) have proven to be very successful at saving lives and property, however, in terms of the adverse economic impacts of the natural disasters, less attention and resources have been allocated. In Australia, natural disasters are estimated to cost an average of AU$1.14 billion annually. This makes natural disasters a significant issue for policy makers.

One of the substantial problems identified which increases this problem is the inability to estimate the full economic impact of natural hazards, considering all the affected sections of the economy. This effort should take into account not only the primary effects of the natural disasters, but also its lingering, all-important secondary effects due to the pervasive losses throughout the economy emanating from various sectors within the economy.

To address this problem this project has identified at least two major requirements that seek immediate attention to bridge the related gap. Firstly, a disaster risk assessment system needs to be developed which provides adequately quantifiable potential damages as a result of different types of disasters for regions of Australia. Secondly, a framework needs to be established to estimate the indirect economic losses. With the identification of the disaster-specific potential damage and losses, policymakers at different levels will be able to formulate disaster risk reduction-inclusive development policies to mainstream disaster resilience practices. Hence, modelling the potential impacts of a full range of natural disasters remains highly critical towards designing more informed national economic policies.

This project is primarily an economics based project applied to the scenario of natural disaster events within the context of Australia. To support the outcomes of the project and to enable a greater understanding of the outcomes the findings are displayed using a spatial visualization platform to facilitate improved decision making.

Since the commencement of the project the research team has been focused on delivering outcomes and working towards the final output. As such, to date a number of outcomes have already been achieved: development of the multi-hazard map for Victoria; development of a method to estimate the effect of natural disasters on sectoral economic growth of Australia; and numerous publications including a refereed paper accepted for Australian Conference of Economics 2015, a paper accepted for oral presentation at AFAC 2015, a report on the multi-hazard map for Victoria, a report on exposure analysis, a report on the damage and consequence data from past hazard event in Victoria, and a paper accepted and delivered for oral presentation at AFAC 2014.