Projecting Volunteer Resource Requirements Under Extreme Climate Futures: Technical Report

This project was funded to consider the impacts of a changing climate on emergency service volunteer resources in Tasmania. It employed a 5-stage process to match current volunteer profile data with Climate Futures for Tasmania climate hazard projections. The State Emergency Service (SES), Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) and Ambulance Tasmania (AT) supplied information on their current volunteers (e.g. age, gender, employment status, mobility) to allow cross-agency collation, comparison and analysis. From this information, the current profile of the entire Tasmanian Emergency Volunteer Network (EVN), each participating agency, and a further breakdown of each by municipality was distilled. The projected change of the EVN by municipality was then calculated based on the demographic projections of each Tasmanian municipality from the Tasmanian Department of Treasury and Finance. With the demographics assessed, assuming limited fundamental change in emergency technologies, the project then provided evidence to help determine the expected requirements of the emergency services volunteer workforce given the projected frequency and severity of climate hazards (e.g. future fire danger, future heat stress, future rainfall runoff intensity), as described in the Climate Futures for Tasmania reports. The information presented in this report is only as accurate and precise as the data provided. The best available data was used to provide estimates, although it is recognised there are many known limitations of these data sources, and these limitations should be considered when interpreting the results.