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Home and contents insurance is integral to household and community resilience against disasters. Yet many households are underinsured. While causes for underinsurance have been widely researched, changes to Australian building regulations in the last decade has established a new source of insurance miscalculations. Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) ratings can inflate rebuilding costs by 20% or more, yet BAL ratings remain obfuscated to homeowners and are notoriously confusing to navigate. After the October 2013 bushfires in New South Wales, the Blue Mountains Local Recovery Steering Group found that 'information on the BAL process, the guidelines, the expected costs, the consulting experts and a property's bushfire-prone status is literally all over the place'. This paper aims to provide clarity on the subject, tracing the precise socio-technical means through which disaster risk is perceived and assessed. The paper conceptualises insurance and risk ratings as calculative devices that provide both a technical solution to reduce financial losses and a philosophical tool for risk rationalisation. It then builds on interviews conducted with residents in the Blue Mountains affected by the 2013 bushfires, to ascertain how such calculative devices practically affect communities at risk. The paper concludes by outlining potential solutions to a confusing and costly problem in Australia, highlighting critical public awareness issues surround BAL ratings, which have profound insurance and wellbeing implications for people rebuilding and recovering from bushfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long term water demand forecasting is needed for the efficient planning and management of water supply systems. A Monte Carlo simulation approach is adopted in this paper to quantify the uncertainties in long term water demand prediction due to the stochastic nature of predictor variables and their correlation structures. Three future climatic scenarios (A1B, A2 and B1) and four different levels of water restrictions are considered in the demand forecasting for single and multiple dwelling residential sectors in the Blue Mountains region, Australia. It is found that future water demand in 2040 would rise by 2 to 33 % (median rise by 11 %) and 72 to 94 % (median rise by 84 %) for the single and multiple dwelling residential sectors, respectively under different climatic and water restriction scenarios in comparison to water demand in 2010 (base year). The uncertainty band for single dwelling residential sector is found to be 0.3 to 0.4 GL/year, which represent 11 to 13 % variation around the median forecasted demand. It is found that the increase in future water demand is not notably affected by the projected climatic conditions but by the increase in the dwelling numbers in future i.e. the increase in total population. The modelling approach presented in this paper can provide realistic scenarios of forecasted water demands which would assist water authorities in devising appropriate management strategies to enhance the resilience of the water supply systems. The developed method can be adapted to other water supply systems in Australia and other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planetary health is a concept that emerged from public health and is of central interest for geographers. Blue Mountains City Council (BMCC) launched its planetary health initiative in 2020, which is a first instance of it being adopted by an Australian local government as a sustainability policy framework. This article presents an initial case study arguing for and testing how to gain empirical insights from developing local planetary health initiatives. Using an online survey of Blue Mountains residents from 2020, we elucidate key opportunities and challenges associated with implementing planetary health in local contexts. We found that respondents experience the impacts of environmental change in varied ways and want to do more to address environmental change. They demand action from governments and others to act, yet do not understand well the mechanisms available to local governments to undertake such action. We also established that planetary health shows promise in its ability to accommodate diverse and scalar experiences and action from personal to communal. Thus, our key claim is that it could be an inclusive basis upon which local governments and communities can deliberate and make decisions about sustainability. However, local governments could experience difficulties in implementing planetary health should deliberation not improve community understanding of the levers available to local government to act on environmental change and the nature of shared responsibility for place‐based sustainability. We suggest geographers could do more work on such matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thermophilization – changes in community composition towards greater relative abundances of species associated with warmer environments – has been described for plants and animals in many locations around the world. Disturbances of various kinds have increased rates of thermophilization in temperate sites, and this has been proposed, but not demonstrated, for some tropical environments. In this study, we tested whether disturbance by a category 4 hurricane in 1988 (Hurricane Gilbert) increased thermophilization in a Jamaican montane forest by using pre‐ and post‐hurricane data collected over four decades (1974–2014). We analysed tree species composition in permanent plots at ca 1580 m above sea level in Jamaica's Blue Mountains. There were 66 tree species with stem diameters ≥ 3 cm at breast height. We used published data on the altitudinal distribution of 62 species (94% of genetic individuals (genets)) to calculate the mean community altitude scores (MCAS) of the trees recorded in each census, as well as the MCAS of the survivors, recruits and dead trees after each decade. We found that thermophilization did occur (i.e. MCAS decreased significantly over time), and that this was due both to a decreasing MCAS of recruits through the four decades (significantly lower than expected in the last three decades) as well as a high MCAS of trees that died. Thermophilization was fastest in the post‐hurricane decade, during which time there was marked and significant increase in the MCAS of dead trees; this change was above and beyond expectations of long‐term successional dynamics. The rate of compositional change equates to an overall decrease in MCAS of 1.6 m yr−1 over the forty‐year study period. We conclude that this Jamaican montane forest is undergoing thermophilization (likely due to rising temperature) and that the hurricane‐caused disturbance accelerated thermophilization through differential mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]