Integrated Education for Resilient Urban Adaptation: Wildfire Risk Reduction in Australia

Abstract

Urban and regional planning education seeks, often through highly applied teaching, to develop students’ abilities allowing them to work meaningfully on emergent urban and regional issues. However, it is relatively uncommon that education itself develops alongside government policy and research agendas. This paper documents the development of a new tertiary wildfire management qualification prepared in partnership with planning and building agencies after the devastating 2009 Victorian wildfires. It is argued that the process of developing educational outcomes in this case paralleled an interactive and ongoing agenda of research, policy development and education that represents adaptive-ness facilitating resilience as learning and institutional change.

Keywords:

• Resilience
• education
• accreditation
• wildfire
• bushfire
• planning
• teaching

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the independent referees for their insightful comments.

Notes

1. In Australia, the term Bushfire is used to describe uncontrolled fires in vegetation, as opposed to the more internationally common term Wildfires. I have used the term bushfire here because many of the proper names used in my text include this term.

2. Key staff were Dr. Chris Weston and Assoc Prof. Kevin Tolhurst, University of Melbourne’s Department of Forest and Ecosystem Science; Justin Leonard CSIRO and Assoc Prof. Alan March, University of Melbourne’s Architecture Building and Planning Faculty.