Network Priorities and Goals
Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events and natural disasters, including cyclones, storms, drought, heatwaves, bushfires and floods with varying degrees of uncertainty about projections for specific hazards. Emergency management organisations are on society's frontline in preparing for such events, preventing damage, responding to the damage and harm when they occur and managing post event recovery.
A full understanding of, and preparation for, the risks from climate change that would inform the adaptation options available to communities to reduce or recover from those risks requires more than simple multiplying of existing emergency management capabilities. When natural disasters occur, the consequences of damage and loss are a function of the effectiveness of the disaster mitigation strategies that have been implemented, the activities of the emergency services and resilience of the communities and economic sectors affected.
The Network has identified four priority research areas:
- Understanding Risk – including climate and weather, exposure and vulnerability.
- Community and Organisational Resilience – factors that support capacity to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters.
- Adaptive Strategies – (i) the capacity of emergency management? (ii) role of the private sector?
- Regional Implications – implications for emergency management of climate change in our immediate region.
1. Understanding Risk
Risks associated with natural disasters will change with the climate. This presents a challenge to natural disaster managers and emergency services, which must now adjust to a constantly changing risk profile and accept that historical information about climate-related hazards is no longer an adequate basis for understanding current and future risk.
An understanding of the risk from climate related hazards depends on:
- The frequency and intensity of the hazards (including spatial extent and duration)
- Community exposure (for example; demographic change)
- Vulnerability appropriate to future individual wealth, building stock and community awareness;
- Impacts that result from the interaction of those components; and
- Resilience of communities to respond and recover from these impacts.
2. Community and Organisation Resilience
Communities vary in their capacity to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters. Understanding the factors that contribute to these variations and using these insights to build the resilience of communities is an important objective of the emergency management community. Climate change complicates this task by adding an extra dimension to resilience - the capacity to deal with expanding and changing risks in the future.
A number of questions need to be considered as part of this theme:
- What does community resilience mean in a changing climate?
- What practices and processes promote community resilience in a changing climate?
- What strategies are most likely to promote these practices and processes?
3. Adaptive Strategies
There are two lines of inquiry.
(i). How will climate change affect the emergency services and disaster/emergency management sectors' capacity to support response and recovery?
The emergency services and disaster management sectors already face considerable strain from current risks and hazards. They rely heavily on volunteers for recovery and response, and attempt to share the risk across Australian society. Increased frequency and severity of disasters from climate change is expected to create additional pressure, especially as the likelihood of simultaneous events will limit the capacity of each jurisdiction to draw in resources from interstate (or from around the region).
(ii) What is the role of the private sector in adaptation though emergency management?
In recent years, many of the resources and services provided by local government and utilised by emergency services organisations for response to emergencies at the local level have been outsourced to the private sector. In some cases therefore, business may become (or may need to be become) a contributor to or partner in emergency response.
4. Regional Implications
The Network has an Australian focus on the research needs of emergency services and disaster emergency management. However, there is a need understand the climate change impacts affecting our neighbours to produce flow on effects for emergency management in Australia. There are two strands to this issue;
(i) the likely strain to be placed on Australia's emergency management capacity if it is increasingly called upon to assist a Pacific Island or South East Asian neighbours.
(ii) and how climate change is likely to alter the current capacity and equipment sharing arrangements Australia currently enjoy especially with the United States.
Research is required to understand how Australian agencies can enhance he capacity of nearby countries to deal with the increased challenges of climate change in order to reduce the flow-on impacts to our emergency management system and emergency service organisations and how Australia would manage without international assistance should available resources become depleted due to increasing frequency of concurrent climate driven emergencies both here and overseas.