Six new projects spanning community messaging during flood to tsunami risk were greenlit for development and now form part of Natural Hazards Research Australia’s (the Centre) core research program.
Selected from research concepts submitted by the Centre’s network of Participants in March 2025, these new projects directly reflect the needs of participating organisations, ensuring our research makes real-world impact, strengthens disaster resilience and reduces natural hazard risk around Australia.
Approved project concepts:
- Community messaging – timing and frequency will create clear guidelines about when and how often flood information and warnings should be shared with communities during operational response.
- National SES Fitness for Role assessment review – phase 1 will review the SES Fitness for Role program to ensure it stays up to date and reflects what SES volunteers do.
- Understanding tsunami risk to Australia from volcanic sources will assess Australia’s tsunami risk from regional volcanoes and develop a database of realistic tsunami scenarios. This project will address the current gap in tsunami risk knowledge, which largely focuses on earthquakes.
- Fire plumes in the atmospheric boundary layer will develop a forecasting tool to predicts lower atmosphere influence on fire plume behaviour to better understand and anticipate fire spread and intensity.
- Improving the accuracy of the fire behaviour metric ‘fireline intensity’ for Australian fuels will improve the accuracy of fire behaviour forecasting through better understanding of the way different Australian fuel types burn under various conditions.
- Floodwater contaminants and effective mitigation techniques will improve emergency responders’ and community members’ safety through the identification of harmful contaminants in floodwaters, understand the health risks of exposure and develop effective, evidence-based mitigation strategies.
These projects have commenced development into Expressions of Interest which will be advertised for research teams in the coming months.
Explore more of our research projects here.