Published works

Australia is subject to significant impacts from natural hazards, the risk of which is increasing due to population growth and climate change (e.g. Newman et al., 2017). Tasmania is not immune to these risks and has been impacted by bushfires and floods in recent years. In the future, threats that we think of primarily as mainland problems, such as drought and heatwave, will increasingly affect Tasmania.

If we could, it would be cheaper, and cause less harm, to deal with some of these threats in advance so we could withstand them better. The difficulty is knowing how to prioritize what to plan for, and how to make best use of available resources, which are generally scarce. This difficulty can be addressed by developing a risk reduction strategy, which requires a good understanding of current and future risks.

The projected increase in risk, together with the awareness of the complexity of the underlying dynamics affecting this risk, has led to the recognition that there is an urgent need to better understand the components of disaster risk and their dynamics. In response, over the past ten years, the University of Adelaide and the Research Institute for Knowledge Systems, supported and funded by the Bushfire & Natural Hazard Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC), have developed a decision support system (UNHaRMED - Unified Natural Hazard Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision Support System) to assist government agencies to better understand how risks arising from multiple natural  hazards change over space and time under different plausible future conditions (e.g. climate change, population growth, economic development), as well as the relative effectiveness of different risk reduction strategies (e.g. structural measures, land use planning, land management, building code changes etc.).  Its development has been supported by the inputs of many stakeholders around Australia, including Tasmanian State Government agencies such as State Growth and Parks and Wildlife Services, shaping what the tool should be able to do and what it should look like.

This report demonstrates some of the potential uses of UNHaRMED in understanding how risk changes over time and in space by embedding foresight into risk assessment and risk reduction, focusing on the following objectives:

1. To obtain a better understanding of future risk across multiple hazards, including bushfire, coastal inundation and earthquake, under changing socio-economic and climate conditions.
2. To assess the potential of various risk reduction measures to mitigate future risk.
3. To reflect on the role of UNHaRMED in supporting risk assessment and risk reduction.

This report first introduces the UNHaRMED system (Section 2), the study area (Section 3) and the application of UNHaRMED to the Tasmanian case study (Section 4), followed by the approach taken to embed foresight in risk assessment and risk reduction (Section 5) and the results obtained (Section 6). The report concludes with the main findings, lessons learnt and suggestions for further work (Section 7).