Evacuation modelling for community resilience: An Australian perspective

Abstract

Communities worldwide are increasingly facing severe impacts from natural hazards like wildfires, floods, and cyclones. Where a life-threatening hazard is imminent, and moving people is a safe option, large-scale evacuations of communities are often undertaken by authorities. In Australia, where evacuation is a recommendation to individuals and households, and not an enforceable order, community safety requires a collaborative approach: where communities take ownership of the risk and responsibility for their actions, and work closely with emergency management agencies for planning, preparedness, readiness, and response efforts. In this context, drawing examples from existing works, we present requirements for evacuation modelling from the perspectives of different end-users (the at-risk individuals and households, the town planner and developer, the risk analyst, the incident controller and response crew). We argue that this technology is useful, beyond its obvious use in planning and decision support, in building shared understanding among all stakeholders for improving community safety.