A review of cyber threats and defence approaches in emergency management

Emergency planners, first responders and relief workers increasingly rely on computational and communication systems that support all aspects of emergency management, from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. Failure of these systems, whether accidental or because of malicious action, can have severe implications for emergency management. Accidental failures have been extensively documented in the past and significant effort has been put into the development and introduction of more resilient technologies. At the same time researchers have been raising concerns about the potential of cyber attacks to cause physical disasters or to maximise the impact of one by intentionally impeding the work of the emergency services. Here, we provide a review of current research on the cyber threats to communication, sensing, information management and vehicular technologies used in emergency management. We emphasise on open issues for research, which are the cyber threats that have the potential to affect emergency management severely and for which solutions have not yet been proposed in the literature

The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date

Return to 'a new normal': discourses of resilience to natural disasters in Australian newspapers 2006–2010

Resilience, as a concept that conceptualises response to change, is gaining currency in the public discourse. In Australia, the term 'resilience' is frequently used by the news media in connection with natural disasters. Media representation of resilience to natural disasters—as rapid onset events characterised by visible thresholds—provides an instructive lens through which to learn about resilience, and bring into focus, differences between academic and broader public perspectives on the concept. In this paper we analyse resilience discourses in Australian newspaper articles from 2006 to 2010. We consider the use of the term 'resilience' and three attributes of resilience that are important in determining how communities respond to disasters: structure and function, self-organisation, and learning and adaptation. Our results show that while the media discourse helps to illuminate what makes communities resilient to disasters, it also highlights how resilience can be undermined when: the term, used most often by actors at from outside the affected community, becomes an 'aspirational rhetorical device'; place attachment manifests as 'lock in' whereby individuals cannot easily leave a disaster-affected community; emphasis post disaster is on reinstating the status quo rather than encouraging transformation; and excessive or inequitably distributed external assistance to a community threatens self-efficacy and cohesion. Media discourse tends to lack reflection on learning beyond formal preparedness programs, but places value on sharing experience. Our analysis has theoretical and practical outcomes: theoretically, this analysis further enriches the descriptions of the three attributes as central concepts in resilience theory. Practically, this work highlights the difficulty in communicating about resilience to encourage constructive response to disasters, but also provides insight into making resilience theory more accessible and relevant to the disaster management community for Australia and globally