Natural Hazards Research Australia’s new CEO, Andrew Gissing, says we need to be thinking about how risk is created and mitigated, and how we move forward and inform decision-making in the most effective ways. Andrew speaks to Radhiya Fanham.
RF: Where did your interest in natural hazards research come from?
AG: I think it primarily comes from growing up in a rural community in Wagga Wagga [New South Wales]. Our house was outside the floodplain, but I grew up interacting with and around the Murrumbidgee River, experiencing flooding numerous times, including the 1992 and 1993 floods. With my mother being a geography teacher, environmental issues were something we would always talk about when driving around, so I developed a keen interest in environmental processes and was able to study things like permaculture at school. I think, logically, my interest in natural hazards led to related study at university and then into employment.
RF: How have your experiences led to your current role as Natural Hazards Research Australia’s new CEO?
AG: The diversity of my career to date is important in the sense that my experiences have given me the ability to think not only through a researcher lens, but also through an end-user’s lens as well, to walk in both camps.
At university, I studied environmental science and economics, I flirted with law for a little while but that wasn’t something I enjoyed studying as much. I really enjoyed my first job out of university working with the NSW State Emergency Service – a very different experience to my first job back in Wagga as an assistant baker at Woolies! I got to spend two weeks a month travelling out to a whole bunch of communities around the state, helping them develop their disaster plans and engage with their communities. One of the things I really enjoyed was the development of the state tsunami plan. It was really rewarding from a sense of the knowledge that was built and the outcomes that we were able to achieve.
I then moved onto Victoria State Emergency Services and was the Deputy Chief Officer and Director of Emergency Management and Communications. I led the community resilience and corporate communications functions, providing leadership during large operations such as the 2011 Victorian floods.
I then moved to work as Director of Risk Management with the NSW Department of Family and Community Services for something completely different, before returning to the disaster resilience sector through my role at Risk Frontiers for the last seven years as General Manager.
RF: Your career has revolved around natural hazards. Why is this so important to you?
AG: It's the opportunity to make a difference after knowing and seeing the significant impacts natural hazards have on people’s lives. In this new role, I’m really looking forward to being able to combine the focus as an end-user and a researcher together, to coordinate a strategic vision and influence research across Australia for the betterment of our communities. I’m really keen to work with our partners on future capability – how do we actually build what we need, twenty, forty, fifty years from now as climate change worsens and more people live in areas at risk of natural hazards? Effective utilisation really comes when you can show its value, so one of the key areas I want to prioritise is building the relationships between researchers and end-users to ensure that our research is needed and creates outputs that will be used.
RF: What is one of the highlights of your career?
AG: There are many one-off examples I could give, but what I really liked the most is the relationships I’ve been able to build with people along the way. I think it’s most about the journey of working with different people in different contexts, building and leading teams, showing I’m adaptive in the way I lead across those various teams and challenging circumstances.
In terms of my research, one of my most enjoyable projects was the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC one on the influence of road characteristics on flood fatalities. That was a good piece of work and it was well-published, but the key thing about it was that it is being used. The work that we did to develop the Capability Maturity Assessment Tool was a great case study of utilisation. It's now being used across the country, providing a better understanding of where the capability gaps are and where the opportunities for advancements are. The work we did on better understanding compound disasters and how we can inform future risk around them is so important. This is especially true right now as we’ve potentially got a third La Niña coming, which are the most damaging periods in terms of insurance losses. That’s an important message in terms of how we think about the future and what we should be thinking about when talking about La Niña going forward, because we need to ensure we’re being responsive to these new upcoming themes and events.
RF: What are your top three priorities for the Centre?
AG: My first priority is to engage collaboratively across partner organisations, policy makers and researchers to ensure that our research is useful, actionable and supportive of better decision-making. It’s important to ensure that our research program is being supported by a culture that puts utilisation and our end-users at the centre of our decision-making, to ensure our research will make a difference in communities, in industry, the government, etc.
My second priority is about thought leadership, which is about inspiring creativity, imagination and strategic foresight across the broader resilience sector to think well in advance in terms of what we need to be doing with capability research.
My third priority is making sure we are constantly reflective; evaluating and measuring the impact of our research to be able to show our return on investment.
RF: What do you envision for the future of natural hazards research?
AG: We know a lot about the challenges we face as our world becomes more complex, so I think it’s really about looking at the opportunities to build resilience and enhance our capability to deal with disasters as they occur. It’s really important that research is strategic, that it’s an all-hazards approach based on risk.
I think there’s certainly a growing demand to translate what future risk means in terms of the decision-making that needs to occur today. A cross-disciplinary approach is absolutely key because of the many different facets of risk and the challenges and complexities of that risk in regard to how it impacts societies. Being able to explore the benefits of bringing together different sectors to work together through research in terms of sharing data and perspectives is so important.
I also think data, in general, provides a pretty enormous opportunity – how we use data, how we collect it better and how we use data to answer research problems, inform decision-making and build future capability.