The theme for AFAC2021 is balancing impact and expectations. As recent emergency events have shown, there’s an evolving extreme that is producing new challenges in terms of impact on the community, environment and economies. The community expects the emergency management sector to stay ahead of these events but with resourcing challenges, overlapping seasons here and abroad, and the surge in reviews, inquiries and recommendations, what do agencies do differently? AFAC21 will focus on how we manage the consequences of major events and meet the expectations of the community and government. The program will explore how the sector can continue to learn and find opportunities to deliver with new and innovative approaches.
IIASA Guest Research Scholar Adriana Keating from the Systemic Risk and Resilience Research Group (SYRR) and Senior Research Scholar John Handmer from the Equity and Justice Research (EQU) and Systemic Risk and Resilience (SYRR) Research Groups, will deliver a keynote speech on "The value of CRC research".
Date: October 5th 2021
Time: 10:00-10:45 (UTC/GMT+11)
Conference stream presentations will be available to view on-demand until 31 January 2022.
More information about the keynote on "The value of CRC research"
Funders of research on fire and emergency management increasingly want to ensure that research dollars will generate value for the emergency management sector and contribute to risk reduction. Researchers are often asked to justify their funding requests as well as their expenditure. Research value can take a number of forms from a readily assessed improvement in performance due to a new widget or process, to increases in capacity and risk management across the emergency sector, and direct and indirect benefits to the whole of society and economy.
This presentation sets out an approach used to value the disaster risk management research funded by the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC. Conventionally, research value for emergency management related research in Australia has been conceptualised in terms of value for specific fire and emergency service agencies, or in some cases for the whole formal (or official) fire and emergency management sector. Drawing on the relevant literature on the value of public research, we have broadened the potential value by identifying four main pathways to value for hazards related research:
- Project level impacts – mostly direct impacts on agency policy or practice;
- Training and capacity building;
- Knowledge generation;
- Broader social and economic impacts.
A sample of CRC project supplemented by a few additional cases are used to derive a representative range of impacts for valuation. Because many of the impacts are incommensurable, and for other practical reasons, we used a non-dimensional ratio to measure impact. We were able to place a plausible dollar value on some of these ratios. This allowed us to convert all the ratios to dollars. These derived dollar values are scaled up to all CRC projects for the total value of the research.
