By working together with other organisations on prevention, we can reduce their impact and create safer communities, a thriving economy and a healthy environment.
Safer Together is Victoria’s approach to reduce the risk of bushfire, combining stronger community partnerships with the specialist expertise from a number of agencies.
The program was initially announced by the Victorian Government in 2015.
What have we been doing since then? Well, plenty.
Over the past 12 months we have been progressively implementing the 2 year pilot program funded by the State Government. We have recently completed our recruitment program and now have 25 staff funded by Safer Together program in CFA.
From 2016/17 we moved from a hectare-based fuel reduction target on public land, to a risk reduction target across public and private land. We are moving closer with interagency planning and coordination across Community Engagement, Fuel Management and research that supports these fields.
We have also assisted a number of communities in planning and preparing for bushfire management:
Safer Together focuses on three main areas:
1. Community first
Six new Community Based Bushfire Management (CBBM) townships have been selected. This follows the success of CBBM in places such as St Andrews, Strathbogie and Wye River. Five new CBBM staff in CFA join an earlier 3 staff employed in DELWP. New townships will be identified in the coming months and the program will continue to grow.
A significant Community Engagement Training contract with an external provider was finalised last month. This will see more than 2000 training places over the next 11 months across CFA, DELWP, and Local Government in Community Engagement and facilitation.
2. Working together
The program is also improving relationships between Department of Environment, Land Water and Planning, Parks Victoria and Country Fire Authority and facilitating greater engagement of local governments and Traditional Owners.
CFA recognises that the power of working together with other agencies, with their shared knowledge and capabilities, will result in greater risk reduction for all communities.
The Chief Officer of CFA and Chief Fire Officer of DELWP last week launched a joint directive for the preparation of a Joint Fuel Management Program, a first for Victoria. Looking ahead this year will see teams of CFA, DELWP and private industry staff come together to agree on the priority for burning regardless of land tenure, and sharing resources to deliver the best risk reduction outcome for communities. We’ll have more news on this in the coming weeks.
Other joint agency projects are aligning planned burn training, development of Strategic Bushfire Management Plans across public and private land, and supporting cultural burning.
Safer Together is also providing a significant boost to CFA’s capacity and resources for fuel management. We have additional planning staff in our regions, funds for fuel management works, and training to build skills in planned burning across our members.
3. Science and technology
Safer Together is implementing a state-wide Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting framework. This highlights the value we are placing on measuring and reporting on our progress on reducing bushfire risk on people and the environment. We will measure are success in fuel management operations and develop methods for measuring our success with Community Engagement approaches, such as CBBM.
CFA together with DELWP and EMV have also been involved in the selection of over $2M of funding for research to improve our bushfire management knowledge. This will see CFA staff involved in further development of Crop Fire decision support tools, improving Fire Danger Period declaration, social research on individual behaviours with respect to bushfires to inform community engagement and fire warning notification programs.
More information on the Safer Together program can be found here.