Community Bushfire Safety brings together in one accessible and comprehensive volume the results of the most important community safety research being undertaken within the Australian Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). Using perspectives deriving from social science, economics and law, it complements the extensive literature already existing on bushfires, which ranges from ecology and fire behaviour to information about emergency management. In doing so, the book supports the increasing emphasis on community safety and the vital role it has to play in Australian bushfire management. Managing community safety requires a diversity of knowledge and an understanding of the many social processes that shape and ultimately determine a community’s resilience to bushfire. The wide range of issues covered in this volume reflects this diversity, including research into gender and vulnerability; the law and its implications for public/fire agency interactions; the arsonist’s rationale; the influence of the media; the role of economics in bushfire management and decision-making; understanding declines in fire brigade volunteerism; bushfire safety policy and its implementation; the effectiveness of community education and risk reduction schemes; and modes of building ignition. Community Bushfire Safety is accessible to practitioners, policy-makers, researchers and students. While the research reported has been undertaken in Australia, much of the material is generic and is likely to be relevant and useful to those dealing with community bushfire safety elsewhere in the world.

This book will fill the gaps that hamper the effective utilization of the resilience and sustainability concepts within emergency planning: one concerns the lack of a comprehensive review of this multi-level concept; the second relates to its multi-level nature. Specifically, the text identifies a need for the systematic integration of these different levels in a manner that illustrates the holistic contribution of the resilience concept to emergency planning. By integrating these different levels in a manner that illustrates the holistic contribution of the resilience concept to emergency planning, a comprehensive working model of disaster resilience and sustainability can be developed. The text discusses the resources and strategies required at each level to facilitate resilience and how they can be integrated to develop a sustained capacity to adapt to nature (and other) hazard consequences. The nature and implications of these inter-relationships will be developed throughout the text and will lead towards the development of a comprehensive, integrated model of community resilience. A key focus of the text will thus be its articulating the inter-relationships between these levels. The importance of basing emergency planning on the holistic application of the concept will also be discussed. By representing resilience in a holistic manner, the text will also constitute a resource capable of assisting assessment of the community implications of any shortfall of resilience resources for emergency planning and for community recovery planning. The book brings together contributions from international experts in core areas. It includes chapters that provide an overarching framework within which the need for inter-relationships between levels to be developed is discussed. It also includes sections that link chapters to progressively develop a holistic multi-level model, and a chapter that describes the final comprehensive model and its implications for contemporary emergency management. It will be useful to those researching or teaching courses in emergency management, disaster management, community development, environmental planning, urban development, sociology, and applied psychology, as well as to emergency management agencies, risk management agencies, engineers and consultants, planners, emergency and law enforcement agencies, and social and welfare agencies.

In this charming and concise book, Nicholas Brown looks beyond the clichés to illuminate the colourful history of Australia's capital.

Disasters in Australia and New Zealand brings together a collection of essays on the history of disasters in both countries. Leading experts provide a timely interrogation of long-held assumptions about the impacts of bushfires, floods, cyclones and earthquakes, exploring the blurred line between nature and culture, asking what are the anthropogenic causes of ‘natural’ disasters? How have disasters been remembered or forgotten? And how have societies over generations responded to or understood disaster? As climate change escalates disaster risk in Australia, New Zealand and around the world, these questions have assumed greater urgency. This unique collection poses a challenge to learn from past experiences and to implement behavioural and policy change. Rich in oral history and archival research, Disasters in Australia and New Zealand offers practical and illuminating insights that will appeal to historians and disaster scholars across multiple disciplines.

This book explores policy, legal, and practice implications regarding the emerging field of disaster justice, using case studies of floods, bushfires, heatwaves, and earthquakes in Australia and Southern and South-east Asia. It reveals geographic locational and social disadvantage and structural inequities that lead to increased risk and vulnerability to disaster, and which impact ability to recover post-disaster. Written by multidisciplinary disaster researchers, the book addresses all stages of the disaster management cycle, demonstrating or recommending just approaches to preparation, response and recovery. It notably reveals how procedural, distributional and interactional aspects of justice enhance resilience, and offers a cutting edge analysis of disaster justice for managers, policy makers, researchers in justice, climate change or emergency management.

Leading researchers give an overview of the field of fire ecology in Australia.