Research Report

Indigenous Communities, Peri-urbanism and Bushfire Issues in Northern Australia

The Bushfire CRC Understanding Communities Project is primarily focused on peri-urban regions in areas where intensive bushfires are possible. However, in the course of exploring peri-urbanism and its complexity, Indigenous communities arose as a special case deserving some attention. Therefore, this briefing paper aims to identify key issues for possible future research for bushfire issues and Indigenous communities in Australia.

Action Research: The underlying approach of the Understanding Communities Project

The Understanding Communities Project within the Bushfire CRC aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between communities and their Fire Service providers. The project operates within an action research framework. It was decided to provide a review of  (participatory) action research to allow a more explicit understanding of the underlying research  process of the project by the fire services and other stakeholders (including other researchers).

Water Quality Risk Due to Fire Disturbance: Tools for Quantifying

Damaging debris flows and other large erosion events are hazards that often emerge in mountainous
landscapes due to the combination of fire disturbance and intense rainfall. Quantifying the water quality
risk associated with these hazards is a complex task requiring deterministic catchment response models
in combination with models that represent the stochastic conditioning by fire disturbance and storms in
space and time. This presentation summarizes three years of Bushfire CRC research where modeling and

Politics, Policies and Paradigms: Challenges of Change in Future Emergency Management

Senior fire and emergency services personnel have to manage many complex challenges and
these demands are going to increase in the future. Part of that complexity comes from a range of
interdependencies of social, technical and infrastructure systems. A core challenge for the emergency
management sector is that the number and intensity of adverse events is increasing, while factors driving
social and ecological vulnerabilities to those events are also changing. This places considerable tensions on

Moving Beyond “women are the problem”: How Can We Better Understand the Gendered Nature of Bushfire in Australia?

Emergency management in Australia is noticeably male-dominated. Recent research into rural fire services
in Australia has shown that women make up less than a quarter of volunteers and that many are placed in
non-operational or administrative roles.
This situation is not unique to Australia and many emergency and disaster management organisations
around the world still lack significant female membership. Fortunately, there is now increasing recognition

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