Planning for Bushfire Resilience

­Tweed Shire covers 1303 square kilometres which includes 37 kilometres of natural coastline, wetlands and forests, vast agricultural land and mountainous regions containing three World Heritage listed National Parks.

The Tweed boasts an internationally significant environment with the highest biodiversity in NSW and ranks in the top three across Australia.

With this expansive network of bushland, natural and agricultural areas present significant bushfire risks for both the ecologically rich environment and Tweed residents who live within or are within proximity of our defined bushfire prone areas.

Tweed currently has approximately 4470 ha of bushfire prone land which affects 16,054 properties or approximately 47% of all Tweed properties.

Of those properties 5383 land parcels are within rural areas where approximately 20,000 Tweed residents live.

Tweed’s growing population and North Coast climate projections for hotter dryer weather are likely to both increase bushfire risk and the number of people exposed to that risk.

This is the critical imperative to implementing planning and management frameworks which will seek to build resilience and reduce risk of people, property and responding services.

The Tweed Bushfire Resilience Project

The Federal Government has allocated $1.275 million to Tweed Shire Council under the Bushfire Recovery - Exception Assistance Immediate Support Package.

As part of that grant, funding has been allocated to reducing the risk to people and property within bushfire prone areas by developing toolkits and information packages to assist landowners including rural land sharing communities.

This timely funding synchronises with the need to action a number of recommendations made as part of the Final Report of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry.

The most notable recommendation 18 which identifies the need to "equip NSW RFS with comprehensive information on all structures and assets at risk of bush fire through the collection and sharing of GIS information on assets in bushfire prone areas".

Also of direct relevance is recommendation 28 which identifies the need to "protect, prepare and build greater resilience into existing communities through a combination of enforcement, compliance, and education".

To understand the current context of bushfire risk within Tweed’s bushfire prone areas, the project will establish a risk map based on the CSIRO mapping methodology which considers parameters of slope, vegetation type, fuel load, forest fire danger index to derive fire line intensity and nomination of bushfire risk.

Development of the property and building asset mapping tool will be coupled with an information and education campaign aimed at those residing (or owning property) in bushfire prone areas.

The campaign will assist in achieving compliance with relevant planning frameworks, planning for bushfire protection principles and promoting relevant bushfire design standards.

It will also include developing a policy for managing unauthorised building works within bushfire prone areas and will identify approvals pathways where appropriate.

The key project actions will be:

• Undertake stakeholder consultation to develop the Tweed Bushfire Project Plan.
• Develop a bushfire risk map based on CSIRO bushfire risk mapping methodology.
• Supplement the Tweed online mapping tool with updated bushfire risk mapping information.
• Develop individual risk reports for each bushfire prone property.
• Create bushfire risk awareness information packs including a series of factsheets on Tweed’s bushfire risk, managing asset protection zones, building within a bushfire prone area, retrofitting homes in a bushfire prone area.
• Partner with NSW RFS to encourage each bushfire prone property to develop and implement a survival plan with a focus on rural land sharing properties.
• Facilitate specialist bushfire planning training for Tweed Shire Council planning and building staff.

The project is funded until December 2022.