Senior Planner and Bushfire Planning Specialist, Laura Gannon, contributed to an exciting workshop hosted by UQ and DLA Piper late last year. The workshop focussed on climate change adaptation, planning and the law with Laura leading the collaborative discussion on community bushfire resilience.
Laura is a specialist in the area of bushfire planning and management, with extensive knowledge and experience with regard to bushfire hazard planning policy, bushfire responsive strategic planning and planning for development in bushfire hazard.
Ms Gannon believes strategic land use planning processes must utilise advancing technologies and risk assessment methodologies in the development and implementation of strategic planning instruments.
“Whilst increasingly innovative practices and data are emerging, it is how these tools are utilised and capitalised upon in a planning context, which will guide resilience activities into the future,” she said.
“Overcoming issues of risk perception, or complacency, and avoiding the continuation of the status quo is a particular challenge.”
Planning for bushfire protection is an area requiring an advanced level of emphasis particularly in the Queensland context. Climate change impacts are projected to yield longer and more severe annual fire seasons, lower average rainfall, more frequent and severe drought and higher than average temperatures.
Serious about their contribution in the climate change sphere, DLA Piper have professionally published the proceedings from the workshop, which includes Laura’s abstract.
Read the abstracts along with a number of thought provoking student papers here.