Published works

There is increasing recognition of the urgency to consider how disaster risk might change into the future, what impacts this is likely to have and, most importantly, what we can do to reduce this risk.  There is also increased recognition that in order to achieve this, we need to adopt a holistic approach that takes into account community values, vulnerabilities and resilience, future changes in population and demographics, climate change, multiple hazards, cascading events, adaptation and a range of risk reduction strategies, such land use planning, community education, land management, structural measures and changes to building codes.

Over the last 5 years, this project has co-developed conceptual, modelling and decision support frameworks for tackling the above problems in conjunction with more than 40 end-user organisations in four states (South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria).  The frameworks facilitate (i) the development of the capacity for strategic thinking and for tackling long-term disaster risk in an integrated fashion, (ii) the collaboration between different government departments and different levels of government (federal, state and local), (iii) the development of a shared understanding of risks and values between a range of stakeholders (e.g. different levels of government and the community), (iv) the quantification of how disaster risks and costs might change into the future under a range of integrated socio-economic and climate scenarios and (v) the development of the best adaptive mitigation strategies under these scenarios.

The above frameworks have resulted in the development of the decision support software UNHaRMED (Unified Natural Hazards Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision support system), applications for which have been co-developed with end users for greater Adelaide, Perth and surrounds, Tasmania and greater and peri-urban Melbourne.  They are now being deployed in a variety of manners to support understanding and decision making on disaster risk reduction along with continual improvements to the capability.

In the last financial year users have now been trained in all jurisdictions. This report summarises some of the enhanced software capabilities along with describe several utilisation activities designed to highlight the benefits of using an interactive risk assessment tool in participatory settings. This has included facilitating a mitigation exercises for South Australian State and Local Government agencies exploring mitigation activities for a changing coastal risk profile and assessing floodplain management approaches in the Gawler River.