The escalating global outlook on fire seasons highlights the urgent need for unprecedented international collaborative learning and knowledge-sharing in wildfire management.
Today, Natural Hazards Research Australia and Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRCC) announced a landmark partnership to support wildfire research, resilience and knowledge sharing.
The Agreement—a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)—creates a formal pathway to share knowledge from the leading efforts made by each respective country to address the growing risks of natural hazards and wildfires through science, collaboration and community engagement.
Natural Hazards Research Australia CEO, Andrew Gissing and WRCC Executive Director, Garnet Mierau RPF attended the signing at Thompson Rivers University, British Columbia just before the WRCC’s Building Foundational Knowledge Gathering.
“Advancing our knowledge around natural hazards risk of bushfire relies on local and global partnerships. Combined partnership efforts ensure we are doing the utmost to enhance public safety, resilience and sustainability locally and globally,” said Andrew Gissing.
“This historic collaboration supports cooperation across mutual areas of interest and global relevance in wildfire resilience, scientific research and capacity building in Australia and Canada,” said Garnet Mierau.
Critical to both organisations is their focus on fostering greater collaboration between researchers, government agencies and the emergency management sector to ensure new knowledge supports decision making.
The collaboration will focus on aligned objectives to:
- strengthen community resilience to natural hazards
- promote evidence-based decision making
- foster collaboration across government, academia, Indigenous communities and industry
- address the increasing frequency and severity of climate-driven disasters
Given their complementary goals, there is potential for future collaboration on:
- transnational wildfire resilience frameworks
- best practices in Indigenous fire management
- climate adaptation research and disaster simulation technologies.
The agreement aims to generate mutual benefits for the national emergency management sectors in both countries, providing evidence-based tools and strategies that enhance all-hazards preparedness, response and recovery capability.