Cost effectiveness of fire management strategies in southern Australia

Abstract

Fire-management agencies invest significant resources to reduce the impacts of future fires. There has been increasing public scrutiny over how agencies allocate fire-management budgets and, in response, agencies are looking to use quantitative risk-based approaches to make decisions about expenditure in a more transparent manner. Advances in fire-simulation software and computing capacity of fire-agency staff have meant that fire simulators have been increasingly used for quantitative fire-risk analysis. Here we analyse the cost trade-offs of future fire management in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and surrounding areas by combining fire simulation with Bayesian Decision Networks. W..