Engaged representatives from research, industry, government and community sectors met early this month to drive tangible change through natural hazards research and innovation at the inaugural Natural Hazards Research Forum. The overarching theme of the Forum was a focus on the future, with a shift from identifying natural hazards problems to actively solving them. Watch CEO Andrew Gissing's recap of the Forum below.
The Forum was hosted by Natural Hazards Research Australia on Turrbal and Yuggera land in Brisbane from 12–14 October 2022, in acknowledgement of the United Nations’ International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on 13 October.
Three hundred attendees came together, predominantly in person but also online, to collaborate on the current state and future of natural hazards research in Australia – what it is, what’s being done, how it can be used and what should be done. Across three days of programming, attendees heard from more than 65 speakers in keynotes, panels and interactive sessions, as well as extra morning and evening events.
The Forum opened with a Welcome to Country from Yuggera man Tommy Bundamba-Ya, before an official launch of the Centre by Minister for Emergency Management, the Hon Senator Murray Watt, alongside Queensland Minister for Fire and Emergency Services, the Hon Mark Ryan MP.
“Researchers are unsung heroes in the emergency management sector,” Senator Watt said. “None of the work we are doing in emergency management can be done in isolation and I want to thank you all for your ongoing commitment to collaborating across the sector. The work you’re doing is making a real change to how we all respond to natural hazards.”
The Centre’s CEO Andrew Gissing’s opening address set the tone for the agenda across the three days.
“Disasters are more complex than they’ve ever been and are being driven by large global forces. We are very good at describing the problems but the key thing that we need to focus on is the solutions. How do we work together through research, innovation and science to keep our communities safe from natural hazards?” he said.
Chair of the Centre’s Board, Dr Katherine Woodthorpe, reiterated the importance of collaborating to create actionable research that addresses major challenges.
“Our aim here is to pose the big questions, to guide us all to solutions to the inevitable challenges of today, tomorrow and the longer term,” Dr Woodthorpe said.
Attendees also saw keynote presentations from Prof Mary O’Kane AC; Head of Climate and Security Policy Centre, Dr Robert Glasser; Dominique Hogan-Doran SC, CEO of Landcare NSW, Dr Turlough Guerin; Brendan Moon, Coordinator-General for Emergency Management at the National Emergency Management Agency, giving his first keynote in this new role; Prof Lauren Rickards, RMIT University; and Zoe Robinson from the NSW Advocate for Children and Young People.
Innovative research solutions to future problems
Across all sessions, there was a renewed focus on how to better leverage innovative, useful and usable research evidence moving forward. Innovative advancements were key to the Operational Response and Innovation session, which brought together multi-disciplinary experts to unpack operational data that is ready for agency utilisation.
Leigh Kelson from FireTech Connect outlined some of the technologies already available to start analysing bushfire data for insights that can support capability.
“We don’t need more data, we need more insights from data to better train the machine learning that agencies are doing,” Leigh said.
Using research to build a stronger future was also the central message of the Workforces and Communities of the Future panel. Speaking on this panel, Elly Bird from Resilient Lismore shared her recent experiences running a community response organisation and what she feels is needed to equip a future workforce for disasters.
“We are using volunteers to rebuild peoples’ homes. Communities need to be enabled to actively participate in their own recovery,” Elly said. “They’re all trying to do it themselves with no money. It’s very easy to resource those communities now so that they can respond to their own emergencies in the future.”
On what’s required from research to create a future-ready workforce, Celeste Young, a diversity and inclusion researcher at Victoria University and senior policy developer at the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (WA), provided a research sector perspective.
“We desperately need to hold on to the importance of public-good research. It’s very important to have industry-based research but that will always be funded. Public-good research is about the communities – our most vulnerable people are the least able to fund it themselves,” Celeste said.
Innovative solutions were also front and centre at the Disaster Challenge Final at the end of Day 2, which saw three finalist teams pitch their responses to the wicked problem: how can disaster preparation engage with the unengaged, the moving or the hard to reach? Attendees saw presentations of three ideas for sharing disaster preparedness information with transient communities, including mobilising diverse gatekeepers to share directly with their communities, using artistic community beacons to disseminate localised information, and using wi-fi portals to disseminate information to tourists. You can read more about the Disaster Challenge Final and the winning team here.
First Nations solutions helping guide the way
First Nations solutions – a topic that was integrated across the Forum program – was central to the Sustainable, Safe and Healthy Natural Landscapes session that explored how combinations of traditional and modern knowledge can care for Country and reduce natural hazard risks. Vanessa Cavanagh, a Bundjalung and Wonnarua scholar at the University of Wollongong, spoke about the importance of Aboriginal women leading the way on caring for Country.
“I am drawing on the momentum of cultural burning for thousands of generations. Aboriginal women want to protect our Country and we need access to Country to be able to do that. Aboriginal people need to not only be involved but they need to be leading this process,” she said.
Bundjalung man Oliver Costello (Jagun Alliance and Centre Board member) presented recent experiences of flooding in the northern rivers’ region of NSW, which helped reiterate that First Nations custodianship is crucial to recovering landscapes.
“Climate is always changing, landscapes are evolving. We need to understand the responsibility we have to Country,” he said. “These landscapes have been so heavily impacted by colonisation and mismanagement and we all need to understand that connection to place means we work together to look after places and species and habitats.”
The importance of First Nations co-design in fire management was also discussed by Dr Andrew Edwards (Charles Darwin University), who has experience creating co-designed and Indigenous-led research on savannah burning in northern Australia.
“Savanna burning is very strategic, it’s well thought-through and there’s a lot of background info and planning, including annual consultation with Traditional Owners and land managers in Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and Cape York,” he said. “Most of the carbon credit that the Traditional Owners receive is poured back into fire management and we’re seeing huge improvements.”
The Centre also launched its Reconciliation Action Plan. The launch began with Tommy Bundamba-Ya’s smoking ceremony that cleansed guests using the smoke of eucalyptus leaves as a sign of good-faith knowledge sharing. Guests heard from Oliver Costello, Murramarang Yuin artist Leanne Brook, CEO Andrew Gissing and Board member Sandra Whight, who each shared perspectives on the importance of reconciliation – not just as a business-as-usual focus for the Centre, but also as a leading value for the sector as a whole.
Community-led solutions for recovery
Community recovery was central to almost every session throughout the Forum, especially the Learning from Disasters and the Community-led Recovery sessions.
The Learning from Disasters session drew together community research findings from historic and recent disasters, including Cyclone Tracy in Darwin in 1974 and new research from the 2022 floods in NSW and Queensland, to share lessons that can build future solutions. Dr Mel Taylor (Macquarie University), who is the lead researcher of the Centre’s Community experiences of the 2022 eastern Australia floods project, led an engaging discussion with her research team on their ongoing social research of flood experiences.
The Community-led Recovery panel, chaired by Executive Director Dr Margaret Moreton from the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, brought together an excellent panel of experts from communities and community research. A key theme that arose from this panel was the need for meaningful and democratic community engagement to lead recovery.
Prof Lisa Gibbs (University of Melbourne), who has been leading the development of community recovery guides built around different kinds of capital, reiterated this.
“With community recovery, we need to focus on the principles of deliberative democracy: influence, inclusiveness and deliberation. The engagement process should genuinely have an influence on the outcomes,” Prof Gibbs said. “And the role of inclusive community groups is really vital.”
Person-centred emergency preparedness was another key theme for this panel, which A/Prof Michelle Villeneuve, from the University of Sydney’s Centre for Disability Research and Policy, illustrated when speaking about engaging with people with disability during disasters.
“Person-centred emergency preparedness doesn’t mean emergency personnel need to go door to door, it means we need to better prepare our communities,” she said. “It’s about putting the power into the hands of the people with disability, empowering volunteers in the community sector, empowering personnel at local council, and empowering transformative change in how they work.”
Community solutions were also a key focus of the closing session about managing risk in our climate-changed future. This session was introduced by the Centre’s Chief Science Officer Prof Deb Bunker and included an engaging discussion with representatives from academia, child advocacy, emergency services and Indigenous management on how to build a resilient future.
Zoë Robinson from the NSW Advocate for Children and Young People presented research with children recounting experiences of disasters, highlighting the ways that inclusion of young people’s wellbeing can build more resilience within communities.
“Children and young people aren’t asked what they would like to see when it comes to their wellbeing during disasters,” she said. “We now have funding to connect with young people in communities to hear what they need.”
Also speaking on this panel was Barry Hunter from the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA), on what he sees for the future of government-to-community partnerships.
“While we play an important role in facilitating and enabling relationships between government and communities, I’d like to think we can reduce our role and move onto other things, to allow those partnerships to keep rolling on their own,” he said. “First responders are most often community members, so we need to have them ready with skills, qualifications, training and confidence in their roles.”
Recordings of Forum sessions are now available and you can use the timestamps in this document to navigate to different sessions:
- Day 1, including the Reconciliation Action Plan launch (passcode = #NHRF2022)
- Day 2, Stream 1, including the Disaster Challenge Final (passcode = #NHRF2022)
- Day 2, Stream 2 (no passcode required)
- Day 3 (passcode = #NHRF2022)