risk assessment
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No abstract available
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INFORMING NATURAL HAZARD RISK MITIGATION THROUGH A RELIABLE DEFINITION OF EXPOSURE Krishna Nadimpalli, Mark Edwards, Mark Dunford Risk & Impact Analysis Group, Geoscience Australia GPO Box 378, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia, krishna.nadimpalli@ga.gov.au Fundamental to any risk assessment is an understanding of the infrastructure and people exposed to the hazard under consideration. In Australia there is presently no nationally consistent exposure database that can provide this information. The need to better understand risk was recognised in the report on natural disaster relief and mitigation arrangements made to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in 2003. The report included a recommendation to develop and implement a five-year national program of systematic and rigorous disaster risk assessments. In response to this Geoscience Australia (GA) is undertaking a series of national risk assessments for a range of natural hazards. This work is being underpinned by a parallel development of a national definition of community exposure called the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS). The NEXIS aims to provide nationally consistent and best available exposure information at the building level. The building types considered are residential, business (commercial and industrial), and ancillary (educational, government, community, religious, etc.). NEXIS requires detailed spatial analysis and integration of available demographic, structural and statistical data. Fundamentally, this system is being developed from several national spatial datasets as a generic approach with several assumptions made to derive meaningful information. NEXIS is underpinning scenarios and risk assessments for various hazards. Included are earthquakes, cyclones, severe synoptic wind, tsunami, flood and technogenic critical infrastructure failure. The NEXIS architecture is completed and the system currently provides residential exposure information nationally. The prototype for business exposure is well developed and a national definition of business exposure will be generated by June 2008. Ancillary buildings and various critical infrastructure sector exposures will be incorporated into the future. While the present approach is largely generic, more specific building and socio-economic information will be incorporated as new datasets or sources of information become available. Opportunities also exist for NEXIS to be integrated with early warning and alert systems to provide real time assessments of damage or to forecast the impact for a range of hazards. This paper describes the methodologies used by NEXIS and how these will be advanced in the future to provide a more complete and specific definition of exposure to inform severe hazard risk assessment, risk mitigation and post event response.
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FIRE-DST is the largest of the projects within the extended Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (BCRC). It is addressing the sub-theme of evaluating risk by developing a framework and computational methodology for evaluating the impacts and risks of extreme fire events on regional and peri-urban populations (infrastructure and people) applicable to the Australian region. The research is considering three case studies of recent extreme fires employing an ensemble approach (sensitivity analysis) which varies the meteorology, vegetation and ignition in an effort to estimate fire risk to the case-study fire area and adjacent region. Outcomes from recent extreme fires have demonstrated a need for a tool to assess future bushfire impacts and risk on regional and peri-urban communities. Such a tool would illustrate (map) bushfire impact and risk across the urban fringe and will also enable fire and land management authorities to develop and assess the effect of appropriate fire risk treatment options at local, regional and national levels. The tool would also characterise vegetation, extreme fire weather, firespread, smoke production and dispersion, and estimate the consequences of extreme fires on communities. As well as being validated using conditions pertaining at the time of the case study events, the tool will be used to explore alternative scenarios reflecting the sensitivity in ignition, fuel load and state, meteorology and fire spread, as well as alternative suppression strategies. Results from these scenario analyses and associated reports and papers will be communicated via the project website and through structured workshops.
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Floods are estimated to be the most costly natural disaster in Australia. The average direct annual cost of flooding between 1967 and 1999 has been estimated at A$314 million (BTE 2001). Economic loss due to flooding varies widely from year to year and is dependent on a number of factors for example, flood severity and location. The most costly year for floods was 1974, with a total cost of A$2.9 billion (BTE 2001). Some major floods and their estimated cost in 1998 values (Agriculture and Resource Management Council of Australia and New Zealand, ARMCANZ 2000) include: <li>Brisbane floods, Summer 1974, A$700 million damage</li> <li>Victoria floods, Spring 1993, A$320 million damage</li> <li>Hunter River floods, 1955, A$500 million damage.</li> Flooding has a major impact on our communities. There have been ninety-nine recorded deaths from floods between 1967 and 1999 and 1019 recorded injuries (Bureau of Transport Economics, 2001). The impact of flooding be devastating, with the affects often extending beyond the zone of inundation, as can be seen in Figure 1. The floods in regional Queensland and NSW in 2001, for example, resulted in an increase in the cost of fruit and vegetables in Australia
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This paper briefly summaries how intrinsic uncertainties in reservoir characterization, at the proposed Otway Basin Naylor Field carbon-dioxide geo-sequestration site, were risk managed by a process of creation and evaluation of a series of geo-models (term to describe the geo-cellular geological models created by PETREL software) that cover the range of plausible geological possibilities, as well as extreme case scenarios. Optimization methods were employed, to minimize simulation run time, whilst not compromising the essential features of the basic geo-model. For four different Cases, 7 geo-models of the reservoir were created for simulation studies. The reservoir simulation study relies primarily on production history matching and makes use of all available information to help screen and assess the various geo-models. The results suggest that the bulk reservoir permeability is between 0.5 - 1Darcy, the original gas-water-contact was about 2020 mSS and there is a strong aquifer drive.
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Australia has a three-tiered hierarchal model of government. A single Federal government, eight State/Territory governments and approximately seven hundred municipal councils make up the three tiers. Each of these tiers, and the separate jurisdictions within the tiers, can have their own standards and arrangements for managing information useful for Emergency Management (EM). Other information resources are held by private organisations. The business drivers for a co-ordinated national approach to `data collection, research and analysis?? was identified by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) review and documented in their report `Natural Disasters in Australia ? Reforming mitigation, relief, and recovery arrangements? in 2001 (released in August 2002). Representatives of all tiers of governments were signatories to this report. Later in 2001 the events in New York on September 11 reinforced the business drivers for access to data that transcends jurisdictional boundaries, as did the 2003 bushfires in Canberra. Against this backdrop there are several projects that are addressing the infrastructure and data requirements at the state/territory level. The `LIST? in Tasmania. `VicMap? in Victoria, the `EICU? project in NSW, the `SIS? project in Queensland, the `SLIP? project in Western Australia and the ESA CAD system in the ACT are examples of spatial information Infrastructure initiatives that partially support EM at the jurisdictional level. At the national level the Australian & New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) proposed a national Distributed Spatial Data Library in 2003. Previous attempts to create centralised repositories have failed but maturing web services and the ability to produce hard-copy maps on-demand have moved this concept to a practical reality. Underpinning the distributed library is the development of a community `All Hazards? Data Taxonomy/Model for the EM community. The majority of the state jurisdictions provided input to the taxonomy, while additional expertises in the modelling and socio-economic domains were provided by Geoscience Australia (GA). The data identified by the taxonomy is sourced from varied and complex sources and formatted into a simplified, coherent form suitable for Emergency Management. The benefits of sharing data through a standardised framework are being progressively demonstrated to organisations through the ability to provide early warning of threats to their assets and services, while ensuring they maintain control of their data. There are still many hurdles to overcome before an infrastructure to support a Distributed Spatial Data Library can be realised. These hurdles can be broadly categorised as technological and cultural. The technological hurdles are no longer a significant barrier as bandwidth steadily increases, and major GIS systems support web service based data integration. It is arguably the cultural hurdles that are the most difficult. The process of consultation and review used in creating the `All Hazards? taxonomy has created a realisation among the jurisdictions of the benefits of closer ties and co-operation in data sharing and delivery arrangements. There is still some distance to travel but the implementation of an Australian Distributed Spatial Data Library for Emergency Management is moving closer to reality.
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In this study, a methodology is developed to assess the vulnerability of individuals within households to risk from natural hazards. The methodology introduces a technique for measuring certain attributes of individuals living within a household that contribute to their vulnerability to a natural hazard impact. The methodology has four main steps; 1) indicator selection 2) a risk perception questionnaire 3) decision tree analysis 4) synthetic estimation. Step four involves an application to an area in Perth, Western Australia. The study found that, through the application of this new methodology, eleven unique combinations of specific attributes contribute to the vulnerability of an individual within a household. The attributes, referred to as vulnerability indicators, of most importance relate to various levels of; injury sustained, residence damage, house insurance, income and type of house ownership. This finding suggests that individual and household finances, when combined with other specific indicators, play a significant role in determining an individual's vulnerability to a natural hazard impact. The combinations of indicators can be mapped in order to provide a useful tool for representing aspects of social vulnerability to natural hazard impacts.
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No abstract available
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Historical settlement patterns have resulted in Australia having most of its major city developments situated on the coastline. Storm tides are a major natural hazard for coastal regions. Severe storms and cyclones contribute 29 per cent of the total damage cost from natural hazards to the Australian community. In 1999 prices, this amounts to A$40 billion during the period 1967 to 1999 (including the cost of deaths and injuries). A storm surge is an increase in coastal water levels well above the normal high tide. If the storm surge is combined with daily tidal variation, the combined water level is called the storm tide. When the resulting storm tide exceeds the normal tidal range, local beach topography will dictate whether significant coastal inundation will occur.
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The datasets contain spatial locations in point format as a representation of embassies, high commissions and consulate facilities/missions in Australia.