.png "CFA Senior Research Scientist Dr Chloe Begg and CFA Project Lead for Bushfire Education Neil Munro")
CFA Senior Research Scientist Dr Chloe Begg and CFA Project Lead for Bushfire Education Neil Munro
CFA senior leaders and researchers joined forces last month with agency counterparts in the second Safer Together Science Symposium to discuss their recent study developments.
The event, chaired by CFA's Manager Research and Development Dr Sarah Harris brought together more than 130 participants in person and online on Tuesday, 12 August.
Speakers from CFA the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) touched on the program's investment in science-based research, modelling and advancements.
CFA Deputy Chief Officer Fire Risk, Research and Community Preparedness Alen Slijepcevic AFSM opened the day and said it was a great opportunity for people to come together to reflect on and celebrate Safer Together's significant contribution to bushfire management in Victoria.
"Safer Together is such an important pillar of the work we do across the sector to manage bushfire risk, and the symposium showcased some of the incredible and innovative work we are doing," Alen said.
"We need this research to help address key challenges faced by fire agencies, including the effects of climate change, the shifting demographics and the complex and evolving operating environment."
The event coincided with National Science Week and explored four key themes surrounding community preparedness and risk understanding and strengthening bushfire operations capability.
CFA Senior Research and Development Officer Dr Nick McCarthy said it was a great opportunity to come together to learn from like-minded colleagues and knowledge share in one room.
"We often all have our heads down focusing on doing the work, so it was a good chance to take stock of all the different programs of work and science projects that are taking place across the sector," Nick said.
"We're really trying to focus on projects where we can enable broader science to happen and to get data out into the research community and beyond, prioritising things that are close to being implemented, while also overcoming fundamental bottlenecks.
"We've got multiple PhD's worth of science we can put toward our fire reconstructions of what just took place in the Grampians fires, where we can look at the fire behaviour to understand and predict future events."
Nick spoke on the day alongside CFA's Lead Data Scientist Kristy Butler about a management framework for large wildfires that we are adapting in Victoria from the US Forest Service.
"We have adapted a new index called the suppression difficulty index that is a measure of how hard it is to work in different parts of a complex landscape," Nick said.
"So, if we're putting people into really remote areas in challenging conditions, it allows some decision support from the index among others to figure out what risks are associated and the probability of success."
CFA Senior Research Scientist Dr Chloe Begg and CFA Project Lead for Bushfire Education Neil Munro also presented at the event and highlighted the Schools in Fire Country program which uses a research-informed approach to deliver bushfire education in schools and reinforces the role children can play as agents of change in their community.
DEECA representatives explored a hydro-fire program that uses behavioural science methods to understand how bushfire risk is perceived and interpreted based on eventual flash flooding, debris flows and water quality degradation following intense fire events and short duration rainfall.
