Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925–2009

A view to die for? Housing value, wildfire risk, and environmental amenities

Utilizing a unique database of residential real estate transactions, we examine the price change near the boundary of the Bushfire Prone Area (BPA), a planning zone indicating high wildfire risk, after experiencing a salient wildfire event in Australia from 2015 to 2016. While the properties within the BPA are valued more by 1.6%-1.9% in general, home buyers pay less for the properties in the BPA by 0.9%-1.7% after experiencing a salient wildfire event compared with the properties located outside of the BPA. Moreover, the properties in the BPA with greater environmental amenities are more resilient to the impact of wildfire risk salience than the rest BPA, necessitating an analysis of the role of environmental amenities in the research on wildfire risk in the housing market context.

Analyzing Disaster Loss Trends: A Comparison of Normalization Methodologies in South Korea

Increasing concern for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction is driving the need for more accurate and sophisticated tools of analysis to protect populations. Standards of analysis that can normalize measurements under various contexts are particularly valuable in the global arena of disaster management. One concern that may benefit from normalizing is the analysis of disaster loss trends. Previous studies have used a combination of inflation, wealth, and societal factors in their normalization of disaster loss methodologies. This study examines the various normalization methods in previous research and applies a selection of eight formulae to 50 years of disaster data in South Korea. The results show both decreasing and increasing trends in disaster damage losses based on the methods, but there are curious biases under the results that may be artifacts of Korea's unique experiences in economic development. The conclusion discusses how the case of Korea may help to clarify the optimal normalization methodology for other countries.

Designing a Model to Display the Relation between Social Vulnerability and Anthropogenic Risk of Wildfires in Galicia, Spain

Since the beginning of the 21st century, most of the forest fires that have occured in Spain have taken place in the northern region of Galicia. This area represents 5.8% of the Spanish territory, but compromises, in certain years, up to 50% of the total number of wildfires. Current research on forest fires is focused mostly on physical or meteorological characteristics, post-fire situations, and their potential destructive capacities (main areas burnt, type of vegetation, economic loses, etc.). However, the academic research to date has not delved into other socioeconomic factors (population structure, density, livestock farms, education, among others), which compromise the existing pre-fire situation in the affected territories, and subsequently reflect the prevailing vulnerability of the population. Indeed, these socioeconomic variables can influence fire occurrence, whether positively or negatively. To fill in this knowledge gap, this article analyzes the relationship between wildfire events and the socioeconomic variables that characterize the Galician municipalities affected. To that effect, first, a thorough examination and selection of the most relevant socioeconomic variables, and their subsequent justification will be carried out. Then, using IBM SPSS statistics 24, a linear regression is executed using the data of wildfires that occurred in Galicia between 2001–2015. The resulting model allows a better knowledge of the importance of the socioeconomic situation in Galician municipalities when wildfires occur. Therefore, this result identifies the existing relationship between the socioeconomic variables and wildfire events, and consequently will help to optimize the interventions that must be done. This may be the best way to carry out prevention actions in order to reduce vulnerability to forest fires.

Smoke aerosols dispersion and transport from the 2013 New South Wales (Australia) bushfires

Environmental monitoring and modelling, especially in the regional context, has seen significant progress with the widely usage of satellite measurement in conjunction with local meteorological and air quality monitoring to understand the atmospheric dispersion and transport of air pollutants. This paper studies the application of these data and modelling tools to understand the environment effects of a major bushfire period in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, in 2013. The bushfires have caused high pollution episodes at many sites in the greater Sydney metropolitan areas. The potential long-range transport of aerosols produced by bushfires to other region and states has been seen by regulators as a major concern. Using data and images collected from satellites, in addition to the results obtained from different simulations carried out using HYSPLIT trajectory model and a regional meteorological model called Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM), we were able to identify at least 2 days on which the smoke aerosols from bush fires in NSW has been transported at high altitude to the northern state of Queensland and the Coral Sea. As a result, widespread high particle concentration in South East Queensland including the Brisbane area, as measured by nearly all the air quality monitoring stations in this region, occurred on the day when the smoke aerosols intruded to lower altitude as indicated by the CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) Lidar measurements on the CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) satellite. The use of meteorological or air quality modelling to connect the ground-based measurements with satellite observations as shown in this study is useful to understand the pollutant transport due to bushfires and its impact on regional air quality.

Observational evidence on the effects of mega-fires on the frequency of hydrogeomorphic hazards. The case of the Peloponnese fires of 2007 in Greece

Even though rare, mega-fires raging during very dry and windy conditions, record catastrophic impacts on infrastructure, the environment and human life, as well as extremely high suppression and rehabilitation costs. Apart from the direct consequences, mega-fires induce long-term effects in the geomorphological and hydrological processes, influencing environmental factors that in turn can affect the occurrence of other natural hazards, such as floods and mass movement phenomena. This work focuses on the forest fire of 2007 in Peloponnese, Greece that to date corresponds to the largest fire in the country's record that burnt 1773km², causing 78 fatalities and very significant damages in property and infrastructure. Specifically, this work examines the occurrence of flood and mass movement phenomena, before and after this mega-fire and analyses different influencing factors to investigate the degree to which the 2007 fire and/or other parameters have affected their frequency. Observational evidence based on several data sources collected during the period 1989-2016 show that the 2007 fire has contributed to an increase of average flood and mass movement events frequency by approximately 3.3 and 5.6 times respectively. Fire affected areas record a substantial increase in the occurrence of both phenomena, presenting a noticeably stronger increase compared to neighbouring areas that have not been affected. Examination of the monthly occurrence of events showed an increase even in months of the year were rainfall intensity presented decreasing trends. Although no major land use changes has been identified and chlorophyll is shown to recover 2years after the fire incident, differences on the type of vegetation as tall forest has been substituted with lower vegetation are considered significant drivers for the observed increase in flood and mass movement frequency in the fire affected areas.