Tag Archive for: disaster resilience

When it comes to natural disaster resilience, let’s not short-change mitigation efforts

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ian Britton

Touring flood-affected Tasmania in June this year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull warned that natural disasters will become more severe as climate change worsens.

He emphasised the need for greater mitigation measures: ‘we have to be very alert to natural disasters and… the importance to make a greater commitment right across Australia to ensuring that we have the measures in place to mitigate the impact of natural disasters’.

The importance of mitigation as a key element of a long-term plan for how we prepare for natural disasters was my key message to over 2000 representatives of Australia’s emergency management industry at the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) conference in Brisbane recently.

I addressed several challenges. Betterment—that’s rebuilding an asset to a more disaster-resilient standard—is rarely undertaken in Australia. It’s our practice to rebuild damaged infrastructure to its original state after disaster hits, rather making choices that might involve making our roads higher, bridges stronger, relocating rail lines and even, in some areas, duplicating electricity lines.

The key finding of the Productivity Commission’s December 2014 report on natural disaster funding arrangements was that 97% of disaster funding is spent after a disaster and only 3% goes toward mitigation and preparedness.

That equation needs to be rebalanced. The economic costs of rebuilding communities is shared by all Australians when Commonwealth funds are dispersed for recovery.

The Commission’s report made some very sensible suggestions as to why we should be boosting investment in disaster prevention: our economy won’t suffer as much damage in a disaster, we can unlock productivity gains, and importantly, homeowners and businesses should pay less for insurance as their risk drops.

Investing in a range of measures, such as flood mitigation infrastructure and programs that strengthen homes in cyclone prone regions, will protect life and property, save taxpayer dollars and grow the economy.

The Commission’s central recommendation was that the federal government significantly increase its mitigation funding to $200 million a year.

That would be a smart investment. The onus is now on the Turnbull government to act on the Commission’s final report. The government’s only action to date has been to refer findings to the states for consultation.

We should be adopting the general approach that the insurance arm of Suncorp has taken in response to north Queensland cyclones: provide insurance-driven incentives for making identified improvements to houses derived from research on where such changes directly impact preventable damage in structures caused by cyclones.

We should be identifying assets that are vulnerable by location to known impacts of disasters and seeking to strengthen those assets to reduce service recovery time. In these areas we need a targeted mitigation program that reduces vulnerability to the most common types of damage.

This should also be an approach that property investors embrace: projects built with resilience in mind should enjoy greater sales and leasing success by offering assurance about the integrity of the project. And more resilient projects will benefit from greater long-term maintenance savings and higher overall value compared to more vulnerable properties.

When it comes to justifying mitigation spending to those charged with looking after our public finances, I’d say that ‘money doesn’t talk, it screams’. We need more economic analysis to advocate for government investment in mitigation.

My key national policy suggestion offered at the AFAC conference was to establish a Chief Resilience Officer for Australia.

Melbourne and Sydney have appointed city-focused Chief Resilience Officers with support from the Rockefeller 100 resilient cities program. They consider a range of sustainability factors and promote agile forms of city governance.

An Australian Chief Resilience Officer could help break down ‘silos’ between national agencies responsible for infrastructure planning, housing, healthcare, education, disaster management and environmental protection.

We have the Office of the Chief Scientist and the Chief Medical Officer of Australia. An Australian Chief Resilience Officer, answerable to the Prime Minister, would, I believe, help the nation better withstand, nimbly respond, recover, and adapt to the inevitable disruptions heading our way.

It’s about nurturing the shared capabilities to enable the nation to face significant challenges that can disrupt the way we normally live. The tasks are so many and varied that a single national focus point for resilience thinking and coordination will yield the results.

In my AFAC speech I used a medical analogy to argue why we shouldn’t be short-changing mitigation in disaster management. Don’t put off preparation for resilience for it will cost us a lot more if we do, just as it’s done with disease.

In our societal response to human disease we have prevention, treatment and recovery.

Treatment is about first aid and modern medicine, and it’s received the most attention because it’s urgent and can’t be postponed.

Recovery is about rehabilitation, supported by ongoing vigilance. Some people, just like some communities after disasters, recover better than others.

The prevention side of public health measures followed last, despite what we now know about its critical importance to longevity.

Sticking with the disease analogue we should be investing more in mitigation because it’s the ‘preventive health’ piece of the community resilience story.

We shouldn’t, however, be framing this as a cost—just as we don’t think about public health measures in this way when it comes to disease. Mitigation is fundamentally about micro-economic reform.

Risk communication: talking at or talking with communities?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Angus Veitch

Early warnings and communication with at-risk communities before and during crises have been central to recent post-disaster evaluations in Australia. Effective risk communication ideally results from engagement with those communities before, during and after emergencies and involving them in the discussion on choices about a range of safety and wider disaster mitigation options.

A key finding from the recent review into the Waroona bushfire in Western Australia noted inconsistencies in the timing of community warnings. Similar issues were raised in the review of the Wye River–Jamieson Track fire in Victoria. That review specifically referenced the need for timely updates to operational ‘risk maps’ as well as information and data logging systems supporting operational decision-making, resource activation and allocation.

While early warnings and effective communication are important for bushfire emergencies, they become even more critical in the case of emergencies such as the 2014 Hazelwood mine fire in Victoria because of the acute and longer-term effects on communities.

With fires blazing for 45 days, Hazelwood was a complex emergency. It involved a series of connected elements: embers from a bushfire triggering a smouldering fire in an open cut coal mine; a near continuous response from both Victorian Emergency Services with support from interstate fire services; health and safety exposures for fire fighters; and environmental exposures and an ongoing public health emergency for residents of Morwell and surrounding areas.

Effective communication needs for such events are seldom addressed effectively with ‘by the book’ solutions.  It needs to go beyond the contexts of warnings and directives to evacuate as is often required in many bushfire or flooding scenarios where acute loss of life is of a prime concern.

The 2015 Productivity Commission’s (PC) report on natural disaster funding arrangements noted that ‘governments can also do better in terms of policy and practice that allow people to understand natural disaster risks’ and that ‘Information is critical to understanding and managing natural disaster losses.’ At face value, an assumption in the PC report is that just being better at communication and passing on information will increase public understanding of community safety and resilience.

The experience of living through complex emergencies that challenge the safety and wellbeing of all impacted is particularly disruptive to community cohesiveness and viability. Those experiences can be difficult for institutions to fully understand and engage with. There’s established evidence that it takes more than just better communication to address community needs in the face of danger from natural and technical hazards.  Effective community engagement needs to sustain trust and credibility of the agencies providing the information.

In cases where there may be a trust deficit between agencies and communities merely providing generic assurances about safety and discounting the potential environmental exposures to communities-at-risk may be less effective.

In an open and candid environment, communities may want to know about issues ranging from concerns about the health effects from inhalation of potentially dangerous gases, a mine fire that proved difficult to control, and the results of environmental contamination monitoring and predictions about potential health impacts. Even though detail on some or all of these points may be uncertain.

In August 2014 a Board of Inquiry into the Hazelwood Fire recommended a number of improvements for meaningful engagement with the public, in particular ensuring emergency response agencies have—or have access to—the capability and resources needed for effective and rapid public communication, and a coordinated approach to the use of social media by government during emergencies.

A December 2015 Report on status of the implementation of those recommendations confirmed that most suggestions hadn’t yet been finalised.

The wide-spread use of Web2 platforms has changed how the public relies on governments or established authorities for information on danger or safety during emergencies. The public have reached the point where they’re not only informing themselves (by sharing information, opinion and experiences), but are reversing conventional risk communication flows by providing ‘on-the-ground’ information back to government and first response agencies.

Significant spikes in social media use by individuals and communities have been noted among both Australian and international communities impacted by natural disasters, as has use of crowd-sourced data in crisis mapping by official disaster response agencies.

But when and how should government institutions involved in complex emergencies (like Hazelwood) engage with constituents? While official reviews indicate government awareness of the importance of sustained community engagement, time will tell if Victorian authorities can effectively implement key capabilities into emergency response agencies.

Australian response agencies also need to make better and consistent use of crowd sourced data, with suitable checks on the accuracy and usefulness of any useful information, logging its receipt and use (or non-use) along with archival preservation.

Ultimately, governments need to understand that communities aren’t passive consumers of information and can also provide valuable information from the ground as contributions to official decision-making on response options.

A key challenge for government is how to reap the benefits of more openness in engaging communities before and during emergencies to both share official knowledge and access public knowledge.

Agenda for Change 2016: climate change, disaster mitigation and resilience

Image courtesy of Flickr user Steve Arnold

This piece is drawn from Agenda for Change 2016: strategic choices for the next government.

Natural and technical disasters are a major strategic security challenge. Deloitte Access Economics’ Building resilient infrastructure report estimates that in 2015 the total economic cost of natural disasters in Australia exceeded $9 billion. That figure is expected to rise to an average yearly cost of $33 billion by 2050 due to population growth, increased infrastructure density and migration to vulnerable regions.

Climate projections released by in 2015, for all future emissions scenarios indicate that Australia will experience more extreme heat, more extreme rainfall and fewer tropical cyclones with a higher proportion of high-intensity storms. The Insurance Council of Australia suggests that climate change scenarios predict a progressive increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters over the coming next 100 years.

The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology projections also suggest increased extreme fire-related weather in southern and eastern Australia, longer and more severe droughts in southern Australia, rising sea-levels with an increased frequency of storm surge events, and warmer, more acidic oceans around the country.

So what can the government do in the face of such complexity? Here are two simple options:

The first is to invest in disaster mitigation. The 2030 Sendai Agenda for Sustainable Development Framework emphasises the criticality of investing in disaster risk reduction and recommended public and private sector institutions invest in disaster risk prevention and reduction.

The Northern Australia Insurance Premiums Taskforce recently released its report on the feasibility of options to lower insurance premiums in areas likely subject to cyclone damage. The taskforce found that mitigating the likelihood of damage is the only sustainable way of lowering insurance premiums in cyclone-prone regions of northern Australia, as well as saving lives and reducing property damage.

Recognising and rewarding homeowners who make their homes more resilient is an example of what can be achieved if industry and communities work together to mitigate the effects of natural hazards.

The second option is to join risk-based thinking with assessing the consequences of future disasters to develop policy proposals for the coming decades.

However, there’s often tension between imagination and realism in future scenarios. An example of that played out in Louisiana in July 2004. Federal, state and local emergency planners and responders from across Louisiana participated in a planning exercise, the source of disruption a hurricane named ‘Pam’.

The exercise assumed the ‘hurricane’ delivered up to 20 inches of rain across parts of southeast Louisiana, with sustained wind speeds of 120mph and storm surges producing floodwaters that topped levees and flooded New Orleans. It also assumed many people wouldn’t evacuate the city; that significant building damage and destruction would occur; that communication systems would be almost completely lost; that phone and sewerage systems and potable water supplies would be damaged; and that chemical plants would be flooded.

Planners and other authorities questioned the validity of the content, suggesting that the severity was too extreme and the probability of a hurricane of that size was only 3%. As a result, recommendations related to the gaps in capability and preparedness activities (as mitigation efforts) weren’t followed or implemented.

But one year later, New Orleans was decimated by Hurricane Katrina with severity close to that used in the scenario, and with many of the projected impacts to the city’s infrastructure and people as listed in the planning exercise.

As a result of Hurricane Katrina, and partly because of the consequences of discounting the future-based scenario, the US Federal Emergency Management Administration now plans for ‘maximum of maximums’ events. A key lesson was that disaster management arrangements worked well for ‘average’ disasters, but failed catastrophically for anything beyond that.

Planning should include practices that emphasise the need to identify the severity and consequences of events rather than just their likelihood. That would enhance disaster and risk mitigation planning and should be considered as a standard capability in Australian disaster management agencies.

So where to next? Australia’s better equipped than most countries, particularly in the Asia–Pacific, to meet the challenges of climate change. We’re fortunate to have a high per capita income, low population densities, plentiful natural resources and advanced scientific and technological knowledge.

That doesn’t mean Australia can be complacent, and a number of strategies need to be considered if Australia is going to deal with the natural and human-caused shocks that are inevitable.

While only two options are mentioned here, they’re important ones: we must harness imagination to enhance planning. Thinking about possible futures and the response capabilities that might be required must be a standard part of national disaster planning. The government should reduce the likelihood of future damage by investing in incremental disaster risk reduction.

DWP 2016: an evolving ADF role in national disaster resilience

Military interpretations of ‘landscape’ conventionally include notions of strategy, control and domination. They also include environmental factors that might impact Defence’s readiness to carry out conventional military tasks as well as environmental protection from the damage caused by war fighting or large-scale training exercises.

When it comes to the effects of extreme weather events, environmental security is becoming more central to national security thinking.

Late in 2014 the US Government Accounting Office and the UK Ministry of Defence released reports which highlighted the risk climate change poses to national security. The UK Ministry of Defence in particular suggested that climate change is an important ‘megatrend’ which could place strain on food and water security and lead to civilian displacement.

Anthony Bergin recently discussed January’s US Department of Defense Directive on climate change and resilience which mandates that all future DoD planning has to identify and assess the effects of climate change on missions and to consider these effects when developing plans and implementing operational procedures.

NATO, through the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre, is also active in coordinating civil emergency planning and response to natural disasters.

So how’s the ADF placed when it comes to facing the challenges of domestic disaster resilience?

DWP 2016 identifies our most basic strategic interest as … ‘A secure, resilient Australia, with secure northern approaches and proximate sea lines of communication’.

A following statement points out that: ‘Our interest in a secure, resilient Australia also means an Australia resilient to unexpected shocks, whether natural or man-made, and strong enough to recover quickly when the unexpected happens’.

The ability to anticipate likely disturbances and their severity is a standard element of disaster planning and preparation.

Over the summer, Defence assisted the national response to Tasmania’s bush fires by providing air lift support for the transportation of a base camp from Victoria to Tasmania. That involved two Air Force C-17A Globemaster III heavy-lift aircraft. This use of heavy lift capability was the most recent example of the ADF’s key role in disaster response.

Defence’s contribution to disaster response and recovery under DACC arrangements is well established, and was the subject of a comprehensive ASPI report some years ago. DWP 2016 does not, however, set out the ADF’s involvement in disaster preparedness or planning roles in its entirety.

The ADF engages with state-based emergency service organisations when providing emergency response support under DACC arrangements. But enhanced involvement by the ADF in the planning and preparation phases of the disaster cycle will require additional, and different, levels of engagement to those currently in place. As Bergin notes, it’ll require more inclusive ADF engagement with state-based emergency services and other support agencies.

It’ll also require broader doctrinal thinking from the ADF when it comes to examining how existing and future capability might be effectively used in domestic disaster management.

Many of the acquisitions outlined in DWP 2016 and the 2016 Integrated Investment Program contribute to real dual-use benefits to enhance national disaster resilience.

Access to sophisticated real-time video and geo-spatial data is one significant aid to disaster planning and preparation ahead of targeted and efficient responses to natural hazards. Both piloted and remotely piloted surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft can play a significant role in acquiring data on land-based conditions—such as fuel loads ahead of a bushfire season—or in rapid damage assessment of cyclonic or flood damage.

The next time a severely destructive disaster occurs in Australia, expect to see our Canberra Class amphibious ships, with on-board hospital facilities and ability to operate without port infrastructure play keys roles in rapid emergency response, evacuation and humanitarian assistance. We recently saw that capability deployed to Fiji after Cylcone Winston. (The subject of the ADF’s role in regional HADR will be considered in my next post.)

Those kinds of capabilities support faster and more accurate decision support and response to natural disasters. They’re examples of what can be achieved by the ADF working across the mitigation and response phases of the disaster management cycle and they demonstrate that network-centric capabilities and data fusion applied to a ‘battle-space’ can also be applied to a ‘disaster-space’ at home just as well.

There are still unanswered questions, however, as to how dual-use elements of our growing national defence capability can be integrated with state capabilities and responsibilities to enhance disaster mitigation and response. When it comes to the use of the ADF, any gaps between federal and state disaster management planning will remain a barrier in achieving effective national disaster resilience.

An emergency management volunteer program and community resilience

Brisbane January 2013

Andrew Nikolic, the federal member for Bass and a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, recently argued that we should now ‘regenerate the seeds of community interaction, the known wellspring of community resilience’.

He proposed two national community service schemes to advance national resilience: the first would focus on getting young people to enter areas like community support services and environmental management, while the second would enlist employers’ support to attract and keep young people in employment. The first proposal sounds somewhat similar to the UK’s National Citizen Service which gives all 16 and 17 year olds the chance to take part in activities that build skills for work and life and culminates in a team project to help the community.

I’d like to suggest a variation of Nikolic’s proposals that was set out in an ASPI paper I co-authored last October on national resilience.

Australia’s world standard emergency volunteer effort is under threat from dwindling recruits. But we should change the tide with an emergency management volunteer program.

The contribution of volunteers to reducing losses from disasters is well-recognised, but the spring may be drying up: the practice of people being volunteers for decades has mostly disappeared. We need some clever ideas to attract and retain these people to maintain Australia’s world standard in volunteer effort.

At the same time, the number of young people not in education, employment or training is increasing, as is the number of older (50+) workers who are unemployed and less likely to find new employment.

State emergency service cadet programs offer one way of engaging both younger and older community members in effective community-centred activities. But another option is to create an emergency management volunteer program (EMVP).

The EMVP would be a one-year program during which participants work in a volunteer organisation, gaining and practising skills applicable in emergencies, including within organisations active in the welfare and recovery side of emergency management.

The EMVP would give people an avenue to volunteer, but without demanding a long-term full-time commitment from them. Like the Australian Defence Force Gap Year program but tailored for the emergency management sector, the initiative would pair individuals with volunteer organisations based on their interests and suitability. It would introduce a common national approach to the training of volunteers, which would enable them to be used cross-jurisdictionally.

An EMVP could also assist in retraining long-term unemployed people of various ages. Participants might receive benefits at a higher rate than the Newstart allowance.

Some conditions of eligibility would be mandatory, such
as not being in education, employment or training for six months before an application and being a recipient of Newstart support.

It might also be viable to extend EMVP opportunities, with appropriate streams of activity, to people on disability pensions.

The costs of a pilot EVMP wouldn’t be significant; a rough cost estimate for the program can be calculated from the ADF’s Gap Year program. Aside from the salaries paid to participants, the cost of running the ADF’s Gap Year program is around $4 million per year (about $5 million for the first year and $3 million per year for subsequent years).

Given the resources required to train military cadets, EMVP expenses shouldn’t be more than the running costs of the ADF’s Gap Year program.

A pilot program offered to 1,000 participants could be run for $4 million for the first year. That would cover a Newstart supplement as an incentive for individuals to take up the program.

An additional supplement of $80 extra per fortnight (approximately 15% of the first four Newstart categories) would equate to around $2 million for 1,000 participants in a pilot year.

This amount would leave a remainder of about $2 million to offer in grants to organisations to train and resource EMVP participants, equivalent to around $2,000 per participant. This should cover all expenses incurred by organisations that take on EMVP participants, giving them an incentive and support.

I concur with the federal member for Bass that ‘what Australia needs now, more than additional bureaucratic architecture—even at the local level—is new ideas. Even too many is good; let public discourse sift the wheat from the chaff.’ An EMVP is one such initiative.