Published on September 23 2016
By: Julia Baird
A consortium of researchers from Brock’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, the University of Alberta, Stockholm University and Uppsala University, Sweden, collaborate on an international comparison of wildfire emergency response.
Wildfires present complex challenges across scales and contexts that no entity or person can address alone. Collaboration is thus critical for effective responses that minimize impacts on the community.
Researchers from Canada and Sweden are teaming up to compare emergency response to the wildfires in Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016, and Västmanland, Sweden in 2014. Their aim is to explore:
- how collaborative networks in headquarters and coordinating entities function in crisis situations, and
- why collaboration is more or less effective for solving emergency response challenges.
Understanding how collaborative networks form and how they respond to large-scale natural disasters is a high priority research subject, with important lessons for policy and practice.
“The scale of the Fort McMurray fire and the evacuation are unprecedented in Alberta’s history. A great deal can be learned about how formal emergency plans and policies came together with ad hoc initiatives and networks to mitigate the tremendous risk that the fire posed. Future disaster responses will benefit from this research,” notes Dr. Bob Summers from the University of Alberta.
The Brock research team includes Dr. Ryan Plummer and Dr. Julia Baird from the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre. They’ll work with Dr. Summers to compare the Canadian data to preliminary findings from the Swedish study conducted by Dr. Örjan Bodin (Stockholm University) and Dr. Daniel Nohrstedt (Uppsala University).
The Swedish results highlight that there are specific configurations of collaborative networks that seemingly result in more effective response to wildfires. But the Swedish wildfire is one single crisis, and to be able to draw more general conclusions, comparisons with other crises are needed.
It is the ambition that valuable bench-marking of “best practices” will be generated through this comparative project.
“We got access to key individuals in the crisis responder networks, which enabled unique insights into the collective crisis response. We are very enthusiastic to collaborate with the Canadian team to see what lessons can be learned across the two cases”, says Dr. Daniel Nohrstedt.
The comparison with the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta will provide an excellent opportunity to offer ground-breaking insights in crisis and disaster management. This research will also generate important practical lessons for emergency management practitioners in Alberta, in Canada, and globally.
Dr. Baird emphasized the urgency of the data collection for this research project: “It is critical to connect with key individuals from the wildfire emergency response effort as soon as possible after the event to ensure their recollection of how collaboration unfolded around specific tasks and challenges is still top of mind.” She and Dr. Summers will be conducting interviews in Alberta in the coming weeks.
This project is funded by several Swedish funders and is undertaken under the auspices of the Canadian-Swedish Agreement on Cooperation in the area of Civil Security Research concluded in 2014. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and the Canadian Defense Research and Development Canada-Centre for Security Studies administer the agreement for the purpose of facilitating joint research projects engaging scientists from the two nations.
For more information about the research project, please contact Dr. Julia Baird (jbaird@brocku.ca).
