Image
Community engagement practitioners gathered in Tamworth last week for the Australian Community Engagement and Fire Awareness Conference (ACEFA) from 20 – 22 June 2024.
With the aim of inspiring, encouraging and interrogating best practice in fire awareness and bushfire preparedness for volunteer and employed community engagement practitioners from the New South Wales (NSW) Rural Fire Service, other agencies, not-for-profit sector, government and private sectors.
Delegates brought with them and represented a diverse range of communities, lived experiences and backgrounds to share their knowledge and experiences to improve understanding of the strengths and resilience within communities.
Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre) research was covered in multiple sessions throughout the conference. Centre CEO Andrew Gissing presented a keynote presentation on Be Ahead of Ready to encourage bold new ideas and future thinking in disaster management and technology. Centre researcher Dr Chloe Begg, Senior Research Scientist from the Country Fire Authority Victoria presented Predictions in public: Challenges for partnerships between research and practice. Part of this research, which Chloe covered in her talk, is exploring how people under threat from bushfire have used bushfire maps to inform their decision making. The research heard from people with previous fire experience from the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), NSW, Victoria and Tasmania to better understand how predictive and incident maps can better communicate fire risk during active bushfires.
A/Prof Mel Taylor from NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water presented the Community Experiences of the 20222 Australian floods - Queensland and NSW conducted by the Centre, Macquarie University, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Southern Queensland. Mel’s presentation explored how research into communities’ experiences of flooding informs communities’ experiences of bushfire and what can be learned from this.
Centre NSW/ACT Node Research Manager Dr Rowena Morris was a panellist for a session about the NSW Bushfire and Natural Hazards Research Centre, explaining how the two research centres can work together and complement each other.