The most socio-economically disadvantaged communities in Australia were disproportionately affected by the devastating 2019 to 2020 bushfire season.
Australians in the most disadvantaged 10 per cent of regions were exposed to significantly higher fire risk than those in better-off communities, according to a new analysis.
Sonia Akter at the National University of Singapore and Quentin Grafton at the Australian National University have studied the link between disadvantage and exposure to environmental hazards.
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Using publicly available wildfire data from the Australian government, they developed a hazard exposure index, which measures the amount of land burned in a given area and also how close that burned area was to human settlements.
To quantify disadvantage, the researchers used existing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on the socio-economic conditions of geographic regions across Australia, accounting for factors including inhabitants鈥� incomes, educational attainment and employment rates.
Akter and Grafton focused primarily on New South Wales and Victoria, the two states most significantly affected by the bushfires last year.
They found that for people who lived in urban areas, such as major cities, the link between socio-economic disadvantage and wildfire hazard exposure was weak.
This was unsurprising, given that the overall fire risk in cities is low, says Akter. 鈥淚f you live in rural areas, the relationship is much stronger.鈥�
The duo鈥檚 analysis suggested that for people living in more remote, rural regions, the hazard risk was much higher for the socio-economically disadvantaged 鈥� even when they controlled for other variables including geographical location, how much of the area was forested and how many times it had been affected by fire in the previous five years.
The discrepancy in risk may result from an uneven distribution of firefighting resources. 鈥淭he amount of resources communities can spend on fire suppression can vary to a large extent,鈥� says Akter.
Rural fire services in Australia rely largely on volunteer firefighters. 鈥淧eople鈥檚 ability to spend voluntary time on firefighting also varies depending on their employment status,鈥� says Akter.
There needs to be more information about how resources for fire hazard reduction are allocated from state governments to local communities, she says.
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