The first Research Advisory Forum (RAF) of Bushfire & Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNH CRC) for 2015 was held at NSW Rural Fire Service Headquarters on the 8 – 9 April 2015 and focused on the Resilience and Policy themes of the research program. BNH CRC serves as the IRDR National Committee in Australia undertaking research that supports the development of cohesive, evidence-based policies, strategies, programs and tools to build a more disaster resilient Australia.
The projects that were presented during the event included:
- Governance and institutional knowledge
- Economics, policy and decision-making
- Scenarios and loss analysis
- Communications and warning
- Emergency management capability
- Sustainable volunteering
- Understanding and measuring social resilience
The RAF’s structure covered stakeholder briefings in a large auditorium and breakout sessions in parallel to the stakeholder briefings to support detailed project level discussions between researchers and end user representatives.
Project team members gave a 20 minute presentation on the state of each project while end user representatives presented for five minutes on how they thought the project was going and where it was headed in terms of potential utilisation.
Four breakout rooms were available to enable cluster and project workshops to take place simultaneously with the stakeholder briefings. All end user representatives involved with the above clusters were invited to attend.