Practical and theoretical issues: Integrating urban planning and emergency management

This report examines selected examples of integration between urban planning and emergency management in Australia. It seeks to identify initial issues to implementation at national and state level. Overall, this report argues that an integrated approach will require a coordinated framework at the strategic, tactical and operational levels, across functional areas and stakeholders, to establish an effective integrated governance approach that offers desired societal outcomes when faced with extreme events.

To examine the challenges and opportunities of integrating and coordinating the activities of urban planning with emergency management processes this report documents and summarises key findings relating to Stage 1 of the bushfire and natural hazards cooperative research centre project: Integrated urban planning to natural hazard mitigation. In summary, it sets out findings in relation to four main areas, below

1. understandings and theories on the main challenges and opportunities for the integration of urban planning and emergency management for improved natural hazard mitigation;

2. an assessment of current approaches to typologies of risk, resilience and hazard in urban planning and consequent identification of gaps that hinder or stimulate particular alignment pathways between emergency management and urban planning;

3. a preliminary understanding of the potentials and impediments of urban planning for disaster risk reduction and urban planning’s adaptive capacity for resilient processes, including economic, social and environmental goals; 

4. a preliminary appraisal of the relative importance of identified challenges and opportunities for the integration of urban planning and emergency management, as a starting point for subsequent research and investigation.

As background to the matters set out above, the report first establishes the main methods used to undertake this assessment.