From 9- 12 June 2026, Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA) hosted researchers, practitioners, and policymakers at its annual forum in Adelaide. A series of workshops, keynotes, and broader discussions explored how applied research can contribute to community resilience, sustainability, and safety in the face of hazard events in Australia and beyond. SEI members A/Prof Nader Naderpajouh and Matin Lahsen Jaafari provided novel insights into research progress and results on the development of an Australian national bushfire database and urban managed retreat guidelines, respectively.
Matin Lahsen Jaafari, doctoral researcher and NHRA scholarship recipient, shared the early stages of his project on how politics, governance, and financing can be conceptualised to make managed retreat - the relocation of people and infrastructure away from natural hazard-prone areas - an equitable form of urban resilience. Using primarily qualitative methodologies and drawing on international good practices in climate adaptation and planned relocation, his project aims to unite a breadth of domestic and international perspectives and expertise, including local knowledge holders and underrepresented voices in resilience planning. In this context, managed retreat is understood as a last resort, once all other forms of climate adaptation have been exhausted or have become unviable; it remains highly contentious, and its design and implementation are often constrained by many obstacles. Jaafari seeks to identify and propose solutions to these obstacles, developing a framework and toolkit to support stakeholder evaluation of managed retreat, a case study report, and a catalogue of policy recommendations.
Associate Professor Naderpajouh presented the results of the Natural Hazards Research Australia's Bushfire information database project, led by him and comprising a team of researchers from RMIT and CSIRO . At the Natural Hazards Research Forum 2026, he ran a pre-forum workshop with end-users, discussing the results and challenges in strategies to move towards a national bushfire database, as well as presenting research findings. This research was funded by NHRA, in response to the recommendations of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements and the 2020 NSW Independent Bushfire Inquiry, which noted the lack of a National Bushfire Database in Australia. The project, in collaboration with CSIRO and RMIT University, provides a framework, in the form of metadata and vocabulary, to lay the technical foundation for a national bushfire database, while also systematically comparing international examples and providing lessons learned for Australia. Finally, the project is complemented with an empirical study of interviews with a range of stakeholders across the sector, exploring the barriers to implementation. In essence, Naderpajouh notes that despite Australia having a range of very high-quality bushfire data, there is a need for a more collaborative approach towards an integrated national initiative for bushfire databases.
About the Authors
Matin Lahsen Jaafari is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Science and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute and the Climate Disaster and Adaptation research theme. Drawing on international experience across government, project management, and research on climate, sustainability, and migration, his PhD project addresses the challenges of relocation in situations when limits to adaptation have been exceeded. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt. His previous research has explored the factors influencing post-disaster immobility and relocation, as well as issues of justice and responsibility in climate displacement.
A/Prof Nader Naderpajouh is Head of School of Project Management, where he also leads the "Organising Risk and Resilience" research lab. His main area of research focuses on collective action and organising across social, technical and ecological systems. He serves as an Associate Editor for journals including the Journal of Management in Engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and as a member of the Editorial Board of journals including the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), while he serves as a referee for over 30 academic journals. He is the founder and co-lead of the research pillar on "projects in the face of climate change" at the Net Zero Initiative (NZI), is a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, and the founding member of the research stream on "projects for sustainable, resilient and just future" at the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership.