Published: 19 January 2015

Bushfires kill, but knowing exactly how might make them less deadly

Justin Leonard

The latest round of bushfires, which claimed 27 homes in the Adelaide Hills, has once again highlighted the importance of planning for the worst. Mercifully, no human lives were lost, and it will be important to learn whatever lessons we can to avoid future tragedies.

A burnt-out car at Kinglake after 2009’s Black Saturday fires in Victoria: whether residents in fire-prone areas plan to leave early or stay and defend, a reliable and adaptable bushfire survival plan is a must.

Credit: CSIRO

My colleagues and I analysed 825 deaths in 260 Australian bushfires from 1901 to 2011, and our research has revealed some compelling evidence to help guide residents to plan for future bushfires.

Most people (58 per cent) lost their lives when caught out in the open. Strikingly, 72 per cent of those people were within 200 m of their own homes (this statistic is based only on cases where details are accurately known).

I encourage you to imagine what circumstances and decisions might have led to these outcomes. Do a large number of people simply wait to see if the fire is really going to arrive on their doorstep?

Bushfire deaths within a house are most prevalent during our most severe fire events, representing 75 per cent of all fatalities during bushfires that occurred on days with ‘catastrophic’ (code red) fire danger conditions. This is despite them representing only 27 per cent of all bushfire deaths.

Of those who died inside homes, 92 per cent were in rooms that did not have a door that led directly to the exterior of the house (once again, this is based only on cases where circumstances are accurately known). This raises uncomfortable questions: why did these people apparently not try to leave the home as the house fire developed? Were they monitoring the conditions outside as the fire passed? Had they thought about which exit was the safest?

Homes under attack

When a fire arrives at a property, the house will experience ember attack. This attack is strongest as the main fire arrives and will persist for a long time after it has passed, and may also start to happen before the fire actually arrives. If the house is close enough to the bush it may also be affected by radiant heat, and if very close then direct flame contact is possible, although most houses are lost without any direct interaction from a bushfire front – which goes some way to account for the seemingly random loss patterns that occur.

Given the timing and intensity of ember attack, it is no surprise that our data show that houses can ignite before, during, and after a fire front’s passage – with the most likely time being during and immediately after the fire front has passed.

For the relatively small number of houses that ignite before the fire front arrives, the occupants may be faced with life-threatening conditions both inside and outside at the same time. There are also a few cases were houses are built so close to the bush or other combustible elements that even the low-level fire that persists after the main fire front has passed is too intense to survive outside.

Nevertheless, for the vast majority of homes that burn in bushfires, it is likely that at any given time, conditions would be survivable either inside or outside the house. That means that, with the right strategy, lives should not be lost.

Designing a lifesaving strategy

It is interesting to note that the current building codes for bushfire-prone areas include specific fire weather severity limits beyond which these standards may no longer be effective. The standards aim to reduce the risk that a building will catch fire, but they also rule out any guarantee that it won’t. The code also doesn’t address the issues of how fast burning homes might succumb, or of how to provide a safe or effective exit path from the building.

So even if your bushland home is fully up to code, you need to plan for a wide range of scenarios. Fire agencies across Australia have stressed the importance for people living in bushfire-prone areas to develop a fire survival plan, and your local fire agency is the best place to start on developing a plan and educating yourself about the specific local fire conditions you might face.

Once a plan has been developed I encourage residents to test their fire plan by checking whether it answers the following questions:

At what level of forecast fire weather severity will you retreat to a non-bushfire-prone area for the day?
Do you understand the local potential fire severity for weather conditions below this level?
For any given circumstances, what are the signs or triggers that indicate that it is no longer safe to evacuate to a non-bushfire prone area? For some isolated communities this will be when fire weather severity passes a certain level; for other, less isolated residents it will be when they are no longer certain that the roads are moving freely and fire will not impact their travel route.
What and where is your personal protective equipment and firefighting tools?
Is the property free from combustible items under or adjacent to the home?
Is the home in an acceptable state of repair to survive a bushfire?
Which areas would be the safest external location to move to if it becomes impossible to stay in the house?
Does the path leading to this cleared area involve walking over or past combustible elements such as vehicles and decking?
How do I monitor all rooms and cavity areas of the home for signs of ignition of fire development inside the house?
What do you have on hand to monitor and put out these fires (stored water, ladders to monitor internal roof space, etc.)?
If you can’t put them out, which exit path is the most appropriate?

And remember:

A deep understanding of the nature of bushfire threat is your best tool in assessing and managing your own risk.

Justin Leonard heads CSIRO’s Bushfire Urban Design team, focusing on the detailed understanding of how infrastructure design and sitting influence it loss potential for various levels of fire arrival severity. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Published: 27 January 2015

Can the property development industry deliver climate-ready cities?

Eddo Coiacetto

Developers often cop criticism for being environmental vandals who’d do anything in the name of profit. But the industry is complex, ranging from one-off ‘mum and dad’ investors to global corporations. One thing they all have in common is that what they produce – residential and commercial developments – will need to perform in future environments that may call into question how or why the structures were built in the first place.

Gold Coast skyline, 2012: Coastal development in south-east Queensland may be impacted by more powerful storm surges and sea-level rise.

Credit: Mike R under CC BY-SA 2.0

There is no ‘typical’ property developer. Private property development is a complex, high-risk industry in which the developer is the entity, person or institution that manages the risks of development.

Unlike builders, developers do not have to be qualified, accredited or registered. While some may come from land-related professions and trades, others may be from unrelated fields, such as mining. Firms can be created specifically for a development project, then dissolve on project completion.

Can an individual developer deliver climate-ready developments? To an extent, some already do. The question though, is whether the entire collective of developers responsible for building cities – the development industry – can do it.

The question is important because developers play a key role in shaping cities.¹ Developments contribute to climate change because they impact on energy consumption and greenhouse emissions. New buildings and houses also affect the degree of exposure of users and residents to heatwaves, flooding and other extreme weather events. The extent to which they do depends on factors like:

location
site features
building features, and
private governance arrangements, such as covenants, easements and body corporate rules that developers put it place for users.

Regulation seeks to influence the above characteristics. But land use planning has had little traditionally to say about private governance arrangements. And building standards are relatively unproblematic and acceptable to developers: there is even a significant degree of industry self-regulation via green rating schemes, for example.

Importantly, controlling the location of developments, and to a degree their design, is politically charged, since it profoundly impacts property values and development feasibility.

At this point, it’s worth defining what a ‘climate-ready’ development industry would look like. It would be one that:

has the capacity to, and which can change to, deliver – in both the short and longer-term – products that reduce or minimise users’ exposure to climate hazards, and products that contribute to reducing energy use and GHGs; and
is at the same time resilient to, and has the capacity to deal with, climate change consequences, both direct and indirect.²

Developers’ exposure to the risks of climate change is limited because their commitment to a project is short – from several months to, at most, a couple of decades – compared to the lifetime of that development and the timeframes of predicted climate change hazards, such as sea-level rise.

Further, developers differ in their capacity and willingness to respond to the risks of climate change. They include builders, solicitors, ‘mum and dad’ developers, large diversified global corporations, mining companies, financial institutions and superannuation companies. They may be individuals or corporations, and may also be one-time operators, occasional developers, or professionals. Some developer ‘entities’ merely manage a development project for a fee while passing the risk of development on to equity investors, who may be ordinary people trying to save for their retirement.

Each entity has a different way of operating and some have more power than others to shape their operating environment. That environment is made up of diverse opportunities and risks – such as market risks, site risks, funding risk and planning risk. Different developers respond to the same stimuli (risk or opportunity) in different, even opposite, ways to other developers.

The problem therefore is that there can be no generic industry-wide response to climate change or to a climate -related regulation/policy. In other words, a given policy will not work with all developers.

Take land-use zoning to control the location of development, for example. Some developers only seek out land that is zoned for what they want to use the land for. However, other developers, perhaps with more time or power on their side, search only for land that is not zoned and then seek to rezone it because landowners want too much for zoned land.

As mentioned, the climate risks are not the same for all developers. A developer specialising in marina developments in North Queensland may be exposed to sea-level rise, storm surge and cyclonic activity; whereas one specialising in retirement units in central Queensland may be exposed to bushfires, drought, heat stress and inland flooding.

This discussion has so far focused only on the development industry. But climate-ready development necessitates a whole-of-sector approach, including landowners, financiers, builders and suppliers, engineers, consultants, and designers.

The role of finance is central and critical because it is this capital that is placed at risk in a development.

Policy makers can support the development industry’s adaptation to climate change by providing timely, accessible information.³

Many government departments are the custodians (and originators) of substantial data banks, yet access is often difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Strategies to improve transparency and communication of government data – such as long-term forecasts of storm surge levels – would go a long way to improving development appraisals. The easier the access to information, the more informed the eventual decision: for example, developers might avoid locations and sites at serious risk from climate change impacts.

So, while the outlook for the development industry (and its products) may sound grim, we cannot afford be pessimistic, because climate change presents an unprecedented threat. The solution thus requires an unprecedented level of consistent and concerted action by all players in the property and financial sectors, including all levels of government.

Associate Professor Eddo Coiacetto from Griffith School of the Environment, Griffith University, is interested in improving the effectiveness planning practice by basing it on a sounder understanding of the realities of urban development. Eddo is one of 31 experts who’ve contributed to the edited collection, Responding to Climate Change, published by CSIRO Publishing.

¹ Squires G & Heurkens E (2015) International Approaches to Real Estate Development. Abingdon: Routledge.
² Coiacetto E (forthcoming) Climate change governance in private real estate development: essential concepts about development for feasible research, regulation and governance. In JR Knieling (Ed.) Climate Change Governance: Theory, Concepts and Praxis in Cities and Regions. Wiley.
³ Coiacetto E, Shearer H, Dodson J, Taygfeld P & Banhalmi-Zakar Z (2014 ) One man's meat is another man's poison: why 'who' the developer is matters in climate change adaptation in the development industry. In P Burton (Ed.) Responding to Climate Change: Lessons from an Australian Hotspot. CSIRO Publishing.

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