Knowledge Sharing - Bushfire risk at the rural-urban interface: Improving fire risk assessment at the urban edge

Urban growth and worsening fire conditions worldwide make it crucial to understand and reduce fire risk where cities meet rural areas, as recent fires in Australia and elsewhere have caused major loss of life and property. In Australia, fire risk mapping often uses a fixed distance from vegetation, but actual risk depends on many factors like building design, nearby vegetation management and fuel reduction in the surrounding zone.

This Knowledge Sharing Forum will present an overview of risk mapping approaches globally, along with the research team’s recent work on the Bushfire risk at the rural-urban interface project, applying a radiant heat model and a novel empirical firebrand impact model at the property scale for two local government areas in greater Hobart—an urban region with high fire risk due to vegetation flammability and urban-rural interface spatial structure.

The research team will compare property-level risk estimates from these models with the Bushfire Prone Land classification under varying fuel loads, fire danger conditions, and fire break clearance scenarios and discuss practical options for reducing risk.