Community perceptions of bushfire risk

2007

Increasing community resilience to the bushfire hazard through raising awareness and increasing preparedness for bushfire is a crucial step towards reducing the impact of a bushfire event. The case study presented in this paper investigates the attitudes, expectations and needs of a community in north Queensland in regard to the bushfire risk in their area. Understanding these social aspects, and the community itself, can lead to better delivery of bushfire services, and thereby increase community resiliency. The findings from the case study present a number of implications for bushfire service delivery in the area.

2013

The term “community” has a long and contested lineage in social analysis and debate. This lineage, however, is not generally recognized in policy and public debates on community and bushfire in Australia. “Community” is thought to be central to bushfire preparedness in Australia, especially in rural areas, but what “community” actually means in this context is vague at best. There is an ever-present tension between the use of “community” as a reference to locality, a “sense of community” as experienced by residents, and the use of “community” as a rhetorical tool by governments and state agencies. We argue that a rigorous analysis of the concept of “community” is critical to an understanding of the processes involved in preparing for the challenges associated with disaster, in this case bushfires. These broader issues are supported by research (a series of surveys, interviews, and focus groups) carried out with residents living in (predominantly rural) bushfire-prone areas in the state of Victoria, Australia. Ultimately, we assert that social participation and social networks are likely to be the crucial aspects of community that play a central role in effective bushfire preparedness.

Australian Journal of Emergency Management

The social construction of risk explains that public perceptions of an objective hazard are often shaped through social and cultural processes. Hazard managers tend to focus on the objective risk, and as a result can often perceive a risk and related issues very differently to the community they are servicing. This has important implications for hazard management. This paper reports on research that investigated similarities and differences in perceptions of community bushfire risk and issues between the community and fire services in Tamborine Mountain in Queensland Australia. It discusses the implications for bushfire service delivery, and also provides an example of how understanding bushfire hazard perceptions and other issues within a community can give direction to locally-specific strategies targeting community safety.

Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 2003

This study explores the preparedness of residents living in a rural community in Victoria, Australia, for wildfires, and the factors influencing their preparedness. Overall, participants were well aware of wildfire risks and appeared well prepared for the event of a fire. However, residents involved in agriculture and with a long-standing association with the area appeared better prepared than were those on small properties and newcomers. Their social networks, previous experiences with wildfires and grassfires, and involvement with the local fire brigade influenced preparedness of long-term residents. Characteristics of agricultural communities, including a culture of self-reliance, experience with fires as part of farming, and social cohesion, appeared to contribute to wildfire preparedness within this community. Included are recommendations encouraging preparedness for wildfires.

Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 23(3):41-8

This paper discusses the process of developing a model capable of informing the development of community outreach strategies to facilitate the sustained adoption of bushfire preparedness measures. Following the identification of anomalies in defining the predictors of preparedness, a qualitative study of the reasoning processes that influence whether or not people decided to prepare for bushfire hazards is presented. The findings of the qualitative study are used to revise the preparedness model. Finally, using data from 482 residents in high bushfire risk areas in Hobart, the ability of the revised model to account for differences in levels of household preparedness is discussed.

2010

Geoforum, 2019

Housing developments on the peri-urban fringe of Australian towns and cities create complexities for bushfire management due to the intermingling of natural, rural and urban spaces. To address the risk of bushfire, policies and practices have promoted and encouraged landowner responsibility for bushfire mitigation actions and behaviours. Using a postal survey, interviews and focus groups, we examine perceptions and actions regarding bushfire preparedness from the viewpoints of individual residents, landowners, and the local fire and environmental authorities on the Lower Eyre Peninsula of South Australia. Respondents living on larger sized allotments were more likely to perceive that their property was vulnerable to bushfire than those living on residential-sized allotments. Larger holdings tend to have more fire-susceptible vegetation than the smaller properties located in fringe suburbs, which seems to confer to those latter residents a sense of greater safety from bushfires. On the other hand, residents on larger blocks reported higher levels of bushfire management knowledge and expressed stronger connections to the place where they live, which influenced their willingness to work to mitigate bushfire risk. Importantly, there is a disconnection between such individual landholder preparedness for bushfire and that of the broader community. Individual actions often do not translate into collective responses, suggesting that a greater sense of shared responsibility will need to develop to enable effective mitigation of regional bushfire risk at a regional scale.

Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 2005

The issue of communities and their exposure to bushfire hazard is highly topical internationally. There is a perceived trend of greater exposure to bushfire risk which is exacerbated by increased levels of building in fire-prone areas or peri-urban regions. There is a need to clarify what we understand to be peri-urban regions, and how we conceptualise and describe the communities that reside in them, in order that efficient and effective services are provided. However, more questions arise for us. For example: Where are these communities located? What do we know about the people who live there? What are the implications for bushfire mitigation? Despite being problematic, locality remains important to the understanding of communities, bushfire hazard and delivery of services.

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015

Many populated areas of Australia are at high risk of bushfire. All state and territory rural fire services have community bushfire safety education programs providing information and advice to residents about bushfire danger, household risk assessment, and planning and preparing to leave safely or to defend a property assessed as being defensible. Following disastrous bushfires in Victoria in February 2009 resulting in the deaths of 172 civilians and destruction of more than 2000 homes, a programme of interviews with affected residents was conducted. This first study revealed generally low levels of both pre-bushfire perceptions of risk, and planning and preparation by householders. Between 2011 and 2014, six further post-bushfire householder interview studies were conducted. Despite fire agencies' community education endeavours subsequent to the 2009 fires: (a) appreciable percentages of residents interviewed in these six post-2010 studies did not believe that they were at-risk prior to the fire and had no plan for what to do if threatened; (b) of those with a plan, a minority were well-prepared to implement their planespecially if that plan was to leave; (c) very few householders self-evacuated before the fire on the basis of fire danger weather warnings. The findings and implications are discussed.

The Australian journal of emergency management, 2009

This paper provides a summary of the findings from a review of available evaluative studies of community education, wareness and engagement (EAE) activities and programs for bushfire in Australia. It provides a brief account of the background to this work and the innovative approach used, known as realist synthesis.The synthesis highlighted the diversity and complexity of the contexts that EAE programs are implemented in and identified four broad causal processes that appear to be critical for the generation of the desired community safety outcomes (risk awareness and knowledge of fire behaviour and safety measures, household and community level planning, physical and psychological preparation for a bushfire, and a safe response if and when a fire occurs). These causal processes are: Engagement, Trust and Selfconfidence, Confirmation and Re-assessment, and Community Involvement and Collaboration