1. Bushfire Futures…
Some blue sky dreaming
Lew Short

2. Adaptive management
• Adaptive management is a structured, iterative process of optimal
decision making in the face of uncertainty, with an aim to reducing
uncertainty over time via system monitoring. In this way, decision
making simultaneously maximizes one or more resource objectives
and, either passively or actively, accrues information needed to
improve future management.
• AM is often characterized as "learning by doing."

3. Key Challenges • Catastrophic fires
• New type of fire
fighting? – beyond
defensive – life
• Warnings protection
• Keeping abreast of • Ability to manage
Royal Commission large events
findings & responding • Situational awareness
to them in a
coordinated and • Fire modelling
strategic manner that • Coordinated fire
support how we do fighting
business and add • Communications
value
• Doctrine
• Climate change

4. Wicked Problems
• "Wicked problem" is a phrase used in
social planning to describe a problem that
is difficult or impossible to solve because
of incomplete, contradictory, and changing
requirements that are often difficult to
recognize.
• Moreover, because of complex
interdependencies, the effort to solve one
aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or
create other problems.

5. Wicked Problems
Conklin identifies the following as defining
characteristics of wicked problems:
• The problem is not understood until after the
formulation of a solution.
• Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
• Solutions to wicked problems are not right or
wrong.
• Every wicked problem is essentially novel and
unique.
• Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot
operation'
• Wicked problems have no given alternative
solutions.

6. Climate Change
• over the next 100 years
projected temperature
rise is likely to be
greater than any seen
over the last 1000 years
(BOM).
• Australia has
experienced a warming
trend in maximum
temperature during
recent decades.

7. • There will be less
water in South
Eastern Australia and
temperatures will rise
by 1.4 – 5.8 decrees
Celsius (BOM).

8. Future Under Climate Change
• Worsening fire behaviour
– Increase in fire intensity
– Increase in number of fires
– Increase in very high and extreme fire danger
days
• Limits to fire suppression and attack
• Reduced window of opportunity for
prescribed burning
• Need for increased reliance on fire mitigation
and personal preparedness
• Change to current practices… innovation &
change

9. The Future…
• Emergency leaders of the future
will have to contend with changes
in demographics, water and fuel
availability, technological change
as well as enhanced natural
phenomenon of cyclones, drought,
tsunami, severe storms and
increased frequency and intensity
of bushfires as a result of climate
change.
• Fire and emergency leaders will
need to adapt to these changes
which will confront their traditional
operational focus and challenge
them to look at other mechanisms.

11. Models
• Phoenix enabled fire authorities to determine where a
fire was likely to be so they could send resources there
ahead of time.
• Phoenix uses a single stream of weather conditions for wind
speed and direction, but will add a model from the US (called Wind
Ninja) that uses topography to determine local wind speed and
directions so wind movement over hilly terrain can be
extrapolated. For example, fire moves faster up a hill as there is a
smaller area the higher up it advances
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/a-new-front-in-
fighting-fires/2009/02/23/1235237560187.html

14. Community Emergency Shelters?

15. • http://www.aph.gov.au/hous
e/committee/bushfires/inqui
ry/subs/sub492.pdf

17. Amatoya Suppression Vehicle
• Designer Liam Ferguson's vision of how to fight fires - concept
• The Amatoya is a site recon and light tanker vehicle designed with a
philosophy much more military than civilian.
• The seating position is like that of a AH-1 Cobra gunship, with the
co-pilot up and behind the driver.
• The Amatoya is built on a monococque steel body, like armed
forces MRAPs, insulated with NASA's aerogel, and painted with
"military grade sacrificial thermo ceramic intumescent paints.“
• The Remotely Operated Suppression Cannon Outfit (ROSCO) has
a 2,200-liter total water capacity, all the better for the fact that the
crew members don't need to leave the vehicle to employ it.
• Nor should they have much problem getting to the fire, with absurd
clearances all around, directional spotlights, and a thermal imaging
camera.

20. Operational Management