IIASA at AFAC21, Australasia's emergency management conference & exhibition.

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.