Disaster preparedness and the need to be ahead of ready

In an effort to envision a future where our communities are safe, resilient and sustainable, Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA) has launched the Be Ahead of Ready report. The aim of the report is to think bolder and more transformatively about our future resilience as a country, so that we may minimise the negative impacts of natural hazards via proactive risk reduction, response and recovery.

NHRA was funded for 10 years by the Australian Government, commencing in July 2021, to address the major challenges arising from natural hazards. It does this by delivering usable, translatable research, which it conducts by working with the federal, state and local governments, key industry bodies, the private and not-for-profit sectors, universities and other organisations with a stake in protecting Australian communities.

As noted by NHRA CEO Andrew Gissing, Australia has experienced a variety of billion-dollar disasters since 1967 — including floods, cyclones, storms and bushfires. Such disasters will only increase with climate change, with the Climate Measurement Standards Initiative (CMSI) projecting more extreme tropical cyclones, longer bushfire seasons, and more extreme rainfall and flash flooding in our future.

This increasing natural hazard risk requires greater transformational thinking, according to Gissing, which means looking one or two decades ahead to ask the big questions about what our society will be like and what we can do now to start preparing right now. This is in contrast to the last several years, where decision-makers have been so overwhelmed that they have barely had time to think about the next disaster, let alone the next decade.

Obviously, one of the biggest ways in which the world has changed over the last couple of decades is through the proliferation of technology. This has already had a measurable impact on reducing loss of life during disasters, thanks to things like early-warning systems and evacuation alerts sent directly to people’s phones. So what sort of technology and other innovations could be used to manage the disasters of the future? NHRA spent 12 months asking 300 different stakeholders to come up with the ideas that could positively change our future, which culminated in the Be Ahead of Ready report. Highlights included:

• Real-time forecasting to help emergency services predict the people and properties most at risk when hazards threaten.
• Autonomous assets, such as drones, being used for ongoing maintenance of critical infrastructure as well as search and rescue operations in dangerous areas.
• Emergency warnings on your phone that are tailored to your personal circumstances (gleaning data from your digital footprint), including an AI chatbot that could answer any questions.
• Augmented reality that could show you predicted flood levels and other risks to your property in the event of natural hazards.
• 3D printing essential parts to quickly restore infrastructure following natural disasters.
• Dynamic measurement to provide a continuous snapshot of natural hazard risk and resilience across the country, rather than relying on outdated, paper-based census data.
   

According to Gissing, public–private partnerships will be crucial to driving this sort of innovation, as will cross-sectoral collaboration. This is because a lot of the innovation that is brought into emergency response agencies is originally born out of other sectors — so a drone that was originally developed for agricultural use could be deployed for fire suppression, for example. Gissing thus encourages bringing the private sector more into the conversation, and NHRA has an extensive network of users and researchers to encourage that conversation. Furthermore, any new technology developments should be made available outside Australia as well — particularly to our neighbours in the Pacific islands, who may be more at risk of losing lives to natural disasters.

While NHRA acknowledges that not every one of the report’s suggestions may be feasible, or have an immediate impact, the organisation believes that now is the time to shift our thinking — from reactive to proactive, from short term to long term, and from small steps to big ideas. This means identifying the capabilities that we need to start working on now, as well as the policy, cultural and systemic shifts that we need to make along the way. Only then will the next generation of disaster preparedness tools be capable of shaping, driving and implementing real change.

To read the Be Ahead of Ready report in full, visit https://www.naturalhazards.com.au/beaheadofready.

Top image credit: iStock.com/gorodenkoff