Let us start with two pieces of data, one from history and one from economics, and a deduction drawn from sociology and politics. The first, from 85 years ago, occurred when the judge presiding over an Australian Royal Commission into the devastating “Black Saturday” bushfires pronounced “We have not lived long enough”. What he meant was that European settlers in this country, Australia, had not learned how to live in a land characterised by climatic extremes of drought, fire and flood. The words echo in environmental historian Tom Griffiths’ “we have not yet lived long enough”, after his review of the long history of lack of preparedness for such events (2010), despite the repetitiousness with which that lack of preparedness has issued forth from reports and enquiries too numerous to mention here. The second is the Productivity Commission’s (2014) finding that 97% of Australia’s public funds spent on disasters went to crisis management and recovery and only 3% on preparedness. What we might derive from these points is that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” (Hartman & Squires, 2006). The history of Indigenous fire management over millennia, leading to early European settlers’ puzzlement over what appeared to be curated/estate like landscapes, underscores the fact that human preparedness and the lack of it are material factors in the severity and impact of any “natural” disaster, that is, if we may have lived long enough by now.
The introduction to this book sets out its essential framework addressing the acceleration of global warming and the consequent growing unpredictability, nature and scale of fire and flood globally. It notes the growing challenge for models that aim to prepare us for such disasters. It proposes that the technologies of immersive visualisation can be engaged to address this challenge, offering the dynamic ability to “viscerally imagine threats, enact hazardous stories, mock-up risk-laden transactions and probe hyper-local preparedness”. The introduction reminds us that this mission integrates and transforms the fragmented arts-versus-science approach, allowing all those potentially facing future cyclones, floods and fires to experience what it could look like and rehearse how to prepare.
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The first part, Picturing, reminds us that preparing for climate disasters cannot be conducted under full experimental—what used to be called “laboratory”—conditions. It is far too risky. The take-home message from the modelling science reviewed throughout this section of the book is that we need to develop immersive, adaptive and evolving virtual scenarios that can replicate actual landscapes and disaster dynamics in all their unpredictability. But “alternative” modelling can be very expensive, and there are real limits to its efficacy as it is typically static, two-dimensional modelling. It also requires very specialist work that is hard to do.
The chapters in this first part trace the research developments from 2D and 3D static modelling to visualisation, then to immersive visualisation and then to artificial intelligence-enabled immersive visualisation. The section concludes that the integration of AI with extreme event modelling presents an exciting opportunity for the research community to rapidly develop a deeper understanding of extreme events, as well as the corresponding preparedness, response and management strategies. Looking to the future, the emerging field of “immersive analytics” is explored, emphasising machine learning and artificial intelligence as having the potential to transform disaster modelling with a reduction of demand for extensive data and computation time.
Like Picturing’s helpful surveys of research progress being made in the science of extreme event modelling, the book’s second part, Narrating, surveys how fields such as the performing arts and screen studies have produced significant work that has not only depicted the threat and the devastation wreaked but that also supported resilience and recovery. This part charts a vast territory in the arts over time, pointing out that surprisingly little has been done in preparedness, despite the trend of growing and now widespread eco-anxiety around extreme weather and its disastrous consequences. It points to crucial societal changes since the 1960s in art, film, television, news and visual effects, charting a shift from “Nat Geo” aesthetic environmentalism to planetary ecosystemics and to mainstreamed awareness of climate change. A key insight is the rise of data visualisation as key to contemporary popular representations of disaster. Included in this part is a discussion of iconic contemporary work in the visualisation of climate change with the iFire project, demonstrating the potential of current technologies to be used to rehearse extreme events when the narration and interaction are designed appropriately. This part of the book also underscores the important role that Indigenous knowledges and artistic practices have in understanding human embeddedness within the environment and in thinking about how best to prepare, based on deep knowledge of the nature-culture continuum.
Rehearsing, the book’s third part, presents work produced in the fields of architecture, and experience and interaction design, and focuses on how to respond to the complex uncertainties of risk-laden confrontations that disasters present. It emphasises the need for tools and skills development that enable successful practice, rehearsal and improvisation in disaster scenarios and demonstrates how immersive environments can be co-designed with communities to support effective rehearsal of responses to hazardous situations.
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This third part presents evidence of the efficacy of approaches such as virtual reality and artificial reality, scenarios, serious games and mock-ups to develop vicarious experience and feed intuition, and their flexibility and adaptability for accommodating diverse scenarios, narratives and means of visualising extreme events. It comes at the question of modelling from artificial intelligence- and machine learning-enhanced architectural design, putting forward two research approaches—space syntax and intelligent mobility modelling—in advancing the research field that this book covers. It is clear about the limits of these approaches, particularly their dependence on known or predictable properties in land- and streetscapes. Nevertheless, this part, borrowing the language of the performing arts, stresses the usefulness of such models “when confronted with unpredictable events, these examples treat people’s behaviours as needing practice, rehearsal and improvisation”.
While Rehearsing responds to the book’s pervasive theme of uncertainty, Communicating, the book’s fourth part, starts with a discussion of the policy importance of “preparedness under uncertainty”. In Picturing, we are reminded that “one of the major open questions in visualisation approaches is how to usefully communicate uncertainty in predictions and forecasts”. In Rehearsing, we are reminded that wildfires and floods alter the landscape, blocking roads, destroying landmarks and turning the built environment and infrastructure into potential hazards, which renders real-time movement disorientating and uncertain. These types of uncertainties form a challenge that we can take on using methods developed for narrating and rehearsing extreme events, such as developing and visualising realistic scenarios, or, for wider exploration of alternative action and outcomes, employing dynamic interactive narrative approaches. The ability for a wide range of community members and stakeholders as well as responders to understand unpredictability; to realistically explore alternative outcomes based on flood or fire behaviour, altered environments or various responses by responders and actors in the scenario; and to be well trained for communicating under such conditions will be essential to developing true community preparedness.
Communicating focuses on communication in disaster scenarios and critiques current practices focused on “top-down” approaches during and in the aftermath of disaster events and governments’ reliance on established communities of practice such as emergency workforces. It reflects on official independent reports into flood and fire disasters in the last five years in Australia, highlighting dangerous gaps in official policy responses—a distinct lack of focus on preparedness and an almost complete lack of focus on the role that arts, culture and creativity can play in dealing with climate emergencies.
The book’s focus is on what specific disciplines can provide in the way of representational resources to better prepare individuals, communities and populations to deal with unpredictable but worsening climate scenarios. It recurs in Communicating and, with it, the additional challenge of how disciplines must transform and collaborate. This is exemplified in its survey of the communication literature showing the extent to which social capital can be built in community use of social media during emergencies. The challenge, however, is to understand how such social capital, once built up in crisis, can continue to evolve post-crisis.
16.1 Final Words
This volume has shown that a cross-disciplinary approach to climate disaster preparedness, involving socially embedded creative arts practice melded with advanced technology, represents real and needed research innovation. The case is advanced for the use of arts and cultural knowledge, including that of Indigenous communities, in concert with experimental immersive visualisation technologies to shift the formulation from static observation to stakeholders viscerally interacting with unforeseen threat scenarios. Such a forward research agenda can deliver a form of sensorial plausibility enabled by the arts as well as a physical probability technology that science can deliver. Presenting this agenda, the authors open possibilities for research, industry, emergency and resident communities to collaborate on visualisations embedded in personal experiences, modelling and creative imagination to ensure that we can prepare better for the impending challenges ahead.
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