Land use planning - a statement on research priorities for natural hazards emergency management in Australia
Research outputs and artefacts
03 Jul 2017
Throughout 2015-2017, emergency service agencies around Australia participated in workshops hosted by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC to consider the major issues in natural hazards emergency management.
This publication on land use planning summarises the outcomes of one of these workshops and poses questions as a guide for a national research agenda in natural hazard emergency management.
Contemporary approaches to land use planning decisions for residential and infrastructure construction must balance consideration of the growing risk from increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters and growing pressure to increase the availability of land.
While it is widely recognised that disaster resilience of communities and landscapes can be improved through better linkages between the emergency management sector and planning of land use and the built environment, this potential is not yet fully realised. Barriers include the inability to determine and articulate the cost of the transfer of risk for the protection of life and property on an all-hazards basis. This applies to new development, extensions to existing development including brown field, in-fill and retro-fitting existing development, and critical infrastructure.
There is significant need to explore a greater understanding of how to include risk into land use planning decisions and the most effective mechanisms to enable this to occur.