Actioning the piecemeal disaster mitigation approaches across Australia

The author has major concerns about piecemeal disaster mitigation approaches across Australia that are getting us nowhere, over decades. Whole communities, towns and cities have inadequate and unsafe disaster protection, including for floods and bushfires.

Current disaster approaches are doomed to failure

Current disaster management and mitigation approaches are doomed to failure because of inadequate policy, funding and management approaches to disaster management and mitigation across Australia, including inadequate understanding of the scale of disaster problems in towns and cities. There is little consideration of whole community, town and city vulnerability and exposure. There have been no real attempts to tackle and improve disaster mitigation for whole communities.

There is miniscule disaster mitigation funding. The Disaster Ready Fund itself, which provides minimal funding and is focussed on recovery.

Many other concerns are included in the full review article.

Inadequate disaster preparation

It is the author's belief that South East Australia continues to be not adequately prepared for upcoming bushfires and to be frank we as a society have learnt very little following 2019/20 and earlier bushfires, especially in regards to inadequate bushfire mitigation. As a consequence, communities, firefighters and the ecosystems are highly exposed over the coming bushfire seasons. Disaster insurance costs are going up every year and will continue to go up with current limited adopted fire mitigation approaches.

Good bushfire preparation and preparedness is important in order to reduce risks to households, communities and firefighters, reduce fuel loads and strata, reduce areas of contiguous fuels across landscapes, reduce bushfire risks, assist in controlling bushfires, reduce bushfire intensity and extent and reduce costs and impacts of bushfires, including rising insurance and levy costs.

The author considers that there are 15 main areas of concern in relation to sound bushfire preparation and preparedness for major bushfires across SE Australia, these concern areas outlined here.

Other information in relation to inadequate bushfire preparedness is outlined here.

Flood preparedness is at inadequate levels, simply look where floods are occurring, occurring regularly, including on eastern seaboard communities. Repeat disasters and rising rates of insurance ram home the point that flood preparedness is at inadequate levels.

Inadequate levels of bushfire and flood resilience are outlined in the full article review.