Responding to Climate Change Disaster

Phase 1: The Pre-Disaster Context

Building on work by Becker and Reusser (2016), we propose that two features, in particular, are important in the pre-disaster context: pre-disaster vulnerability and environmental hazards. Pre-disaster vulnerability is a key predictor of whether there will be a disaster in the first place (Becker & Reusser, 2016). For example, an earthquake has the potential to cause widespread material damage and loss of life, but it is less likely to precipitate a disaster if the affected region has effectively reduced its vulnerability through legislation and action to earthquake-proof buildings.

In the Australian context, there are at least three interconnected, partly sequential, reasons to conclude that Australia was poorly prepared for the 2019/2020 bushfires. Specifically, (a) the highly politicized context fuelled unhelpful “us” versus “them” dynamics which allowed for (b) climate change inaction on the part of the Australian Federal Government, and which in turn led to (c) disaster response unpreparedness. We will unpack these processes in turn.

First, while there is broad political consensus about the need for swift political action to address climate change impacts by many North European politicians (ensuring bi-partisan support for climate change action), a similar political consensus has not been reached in Australia. Arguably as a result of Australia’s vested interest in the coal and fossil fuel industry, here the issue of climate change is highly politicized in ways that give rise to clashes between those politicians who prioritize economic growth and those who demand urgent climate change action (Hornsey & Fielding, 2020). As a result, toxic “us” versus “them” dynamics are a prevailing feature of climate-related public discourse.

Second, this “us” versus “them” dynamic has provided fertile ground for inaction on climate change by the Federal Government. The Liberal-National Coalition (an alliance between center-right and right-wing political parties) has been in government since 2013 and has been led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison (leader of the Liberal Party) since 2018. Even though there are only a handful of individuals in the government who question the existence of climate change outright, it has been argued that the Federal Government’s stance can at best be described as not seeing climate change as a central issue (Grattan, 2019). In this regard, it has been suggested that the main reasons for climate change inaction are economic: Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels and the largest coal exporter (Kilvert, 2019). As a result, limited resources have been made available either to reduce emissions, or to move to clean energy production, or to understand the impending impacts of climate change on Australian society. Indeed, in a recent report by the Australian Climate Council, the Federal Government’s inaction was summarized as follows:

Third, as a result of the Federal Government’s climate change inaction, Australia was largely underprepared for the extreme 2019/2020 fire season. However, this was not because the Federal Government was unaware of impending problems. Indeed, in April 2019, a group of former Australian fire services chiefs had warned the Federal Government that Australia was not ready for the upcoming fire season. However, their overtures were met with political inertia and inaction (Grattan, 2019), and this in turn severely reduced the fire-fighters’ capacity to effectively combat and control the extensive bushfires when these eventuated.

The second pre-disaster factor, environmental hazards, relates to the extent to which it is likely that natural disasters will occur in a particular area. In the context of bushfires in Australia, historically, these have posed a serious environmental hazard in large parts of the country. The ferocity and number of bushfires in the fire season are determined by the physical environment relating to dryness, temperature, and amount of fuel (i.e., combustible material) on the ground. Even though Australia is one of the most fire-prone countries in the world, there is now widespread agreement that climate change has worsened bushfire conditions by causing prolonged and more regular droughts and record high temperatures (Delaney, 2020). Together, these conditions have increased the length of the fire season across large parts of the country, further limiting opportunities to engage safely in back-burning (i.e., burning to reduce the amount of fuel for a potential fire).

In combination, pre-disaster vulnerability and environmental hazards determine not only the likelihood that a disaster will occur but also the extent to which a disaster will have widespread destructive consequences. In addition, the pre-disaster context needs to be evaluated and appraised in the context of the post-disaster response. Ideally, the pre-disaster preparedness should facilitate an adaptive post-disaster response.

Applying this analysis to the bushfire preparedness of Australia, it is noteworthy that the Productivity Commission in Australia warned the Federal Government as early as 2014 that bushfire prevention was not only largely overlooked but also severely under-resourced (Stanley, 2019). In their report, the commission stated that the Federal Government’s natural disaster funding arrangements were “prone to cost-shifting, ad-hoc responses, and short-term political opportunism.” More particularly, the commission noted that the government tended to “overinvest in post-disaster reconstruction and underinvest in mitigation that would limit the impact of natural disasters in the first place.” This statement issued 5 years before the 2019/2020 catastrophic Australian bushfires, leads us to conclude that poor pre-disaster preparedness significantly affected post-disaster vulnerability in this instance.

Phase 2: The Critical Period Following a Disaster

Following a disaster, there is typically a window of time when the status quo might be changed. Such periods have also been called “critical junctures” which are typically relatively short periods of time during which “there is a substantially heightened probability that agent’s choices will affect the choices of interest” (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 348). That is, constraints that normally restrict political action are pushed to the background and this has at least two consequences: first, “agents face a broader than the typical range of feasible options” and, second, “their choices from among these options are likely to have a significant impact on subsequent outcomes” (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 348).

The 2019/2020 bushfires can be seen to have presented just such a critical juncture for Australia and the Federal Government. At this point, under-preparedness for bushfires and the force and scale of the bushfire season in 2019/2020 created the conditions for disaster on an unprecedented scale. By mid-January 2020, according to the Australian Department of Home Affairs, its toll was estimated at 12.6 million hectares burnt (Werner & Lyons, 2020). Furthermore, according to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, at least 3,500 homes and thousands of other buildings were lost, 34 people were killed, an estimated 1 billion animals killed and several endangered species were driven to extinction (see https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disaster/2019-australian-wildfires). In addition, air quality was at hazardous levels for prolonged periods of time for a large part of the East Coast of Australia (Borchers-Arriagada et al., 2020; Yu et al., 2020). According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, an estimated 434 million tonnes of CO₂ was emitted into the atmosphere (see Werner & Lyons, 2020).

The idea of crises of this scale providing a “window of opportunity” for governments to engage in significant policy change is of course not new and has been discussed extensively in the public policy literature. A well-known strand within public policy analysis is Historical Institutionalism, which argues that significant policy change is unlikely under normal conditions, because ideas, norms, and practices become subject to “path-dependency” and become “institutionalized” (Pierson & Skocpol, 2002; Thelen, 1999). According to this analysis, the scope for policy change is greater during critical junctures as here leaders and policy-makers are presented with a temporary window of opportunity in which to introduce more radical change.

Downs (1972) argued that windows of opportunity are often rather short because public attention rarely remains focused on a particular domestic policy issue for very long. Nevertheless, Kingdon (1995) argued that in this very short window of opportunity there will be scope for significant policy change when three “streams” coincide, namely (a) the “problem stream” (issue salience), (b) the “policy stream” (available policy options), and (c) the “political stream” (public mood). According to Kingdon, it is only when these streams align that policy entrepreneurs have an opportunity to “pounce” and propose radical policy changes. The unprecedented bushfires in Australia appear to be a close fit to these conditions being met: there was a pressing issue (large-scale bushfires), there were policy options (e.g., a tax on carbon, cold burning by Indigenous bushrangers, an emissions trading scheme), and, more importantly, the public mood shifted toward favoring climate change action over inaction.

Indeed, the ferocity and scale of the bushfires led to a context where the discussion in media started to focus on the relationship between climate change and bushfires. Admittedly, explicit support for climate change action among the public was always relatively high in Australia. Before the bushfires, 78% of Australians supported reducing fossil fuel use and 64% supported raising taxes to achieve that goal (Jackman et al., 2019). Moreover, there did not appear to be much disagreement in the Australian electorate on the importance of climate change action as a function of political preference. That is, while 98% of Greens voters supported reductions in fossil fuels and 88% supported taxes to achieve this, enthusiasm was nearly as high in center-left Labour voters (88% and 79%, respectively) and still quite high among center-right Liberal-National voters (62% and 48%, respectively; Jackman et al., 2019). Yet despite the widespread support for climate change action among the public, this consensus was not mirrored in the will of Australia’s political leaders. Here disagreement closely followed political party lines: while the agenda of the Greens was to support ambitious climate change action, the governing Liberal-National Coalition was (and remains) unwilling to support initiatives that move Australia from an economy that is fossil fuel-dependent to one that develops its renewable energy potential (see Fielding et al., 2012, for evidence of political polarisation on climate change among politicians in Australia). Indicative of this, in December 2019, Australia was ranked worst in terms of climate change policy, and sixth-worst overall, out of 57 countries assessed on the Climate Change Performance Index (Delaney, 2020).

Arguably, the 2019/2020 bushfires substantially shifted public opinion to even further support for the importance of swift and strong action. Indeed, the tide seems to be turning with public opinion becoming more concerned about bushfires and climate change. A post-disaster poll in January 2020 (Biddle et al., 2020) showed that a vast majority of Australians (nearly 80%) felt touched in some way by the fires and 53.6% were anxious or worried about the fires. In terms of climate change attitudes, compared to 2008 polling, there was a significant increase in concern for the loss of native vegetation, animal species, or biodiversity (up 13 percentage points), and drought and drying (up 9 percentage points). This poll also showed that after the bushfire disaster, there was a large increase in the proportion of people who believe global warming or climate change will impact their lives. Nearly three-quarters (72.3%) of respondents said global warming was a very serious or fairly serious threat (an increase from 56% in 2008). Moreover, support for new coal mines had declined sharply post-disaster (from 71.8% in June 2019 to 57.5% in January 2020). It was also clear from this poll that confidence in the Federal Government declined over the disaster period. Confidence had dropped by 10.9 percentage points from 38.2% in October 2019 (pre-disaster) to 27.3% by January 2020 (post-disaster). This might indicate that while, at present, the political forces (and its leadership) may promote status quo maintenance at the expense of social change (Wallace, 2020), the demands of an ever-growing concerned and anxious general public might shift the balance of power on this issue in the near future.

Other opinion poll data show that climate change action (and the current inaction) is rapidly becoming a major concern among the Australian electorate (https://www.roymorgan.com). Specifically, among a representative sample of 1,054 Australians, environmental concern was spontaneously mentioned by 41% as the most important issue in October 2019 (at the start of the disastrous bushfire season and when the prolonged negative impact of the drought was making headline news), up by 17 percentage points since June 2019. In October 2019, only 22% cited economic issues as the most important problem facing Australia today, down 12% compared to June 2019. This was the first time since February 2011 (when the Australian state of Queensland was hit by widespread and severe flooding) that environmental issues were seen as more important than economic problems.

In the context of public opinion shifting toward a preference for action over inaction on climate change, there was, therefore, a window of opportunity whereby a political push for climate change action would be widely supported. This was a critical juncture at which departure from the previous policy not only became possible but was widely supported – and in some quarters demanded – by the general public. In the remainder of this paper, we focus on identifying ways in which leaders can react to such opportunities, and how these reactions may facilitate or constrain policy change and future disaster preparedness. We focus in particular on political leadership and define leadership as the process of influencing people in a way that motivates them to contribute to the achievement of group goals (Haslam et al., 2015). In this context, the paramount goal is to protect communities and society at large from disasters such as bushfires.

Phase 3: The Post-Disaster Context

The critical juncture of a disaster offers a greater latitude for leaders to push for particular agendas. In particular, there is good evidence that in the aftermath of a disaster, political leaders are given a greater mandate than before to implement policy to enhance post-disaster preparedness and future-proof an affected region or country against similar future threats (Demiroz & Kapucu, 2012). This is especially likely to be the case when the disaster brings into sharp focus the pre-disaster vulnerability of a region and the extent to which the severity of environmental hazards had previously been underestimated.

This appetite for change flows from the fact that disasters demand attention (Downs, 1972), are associated with media attention, and open up a public discussion on whether maintenance of the status quo in terms of policy helps to prevent future disasters. As a result, after a disaster, the constraints that normally determine policy and political decision-making are typically relaxed because the public is asking questions about what went wrong and how similar disasters might be averted, or minimized, in the future. It has been suggested that disasters are therefore often a great opportunity for leaders to push for dramatic policy reform because the public is more accepting of the need for a radical departure from current ways of thinking to enhance post-disaster preparedness. For instance, the former Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, capitalized on the public outcry following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre to legislate for tighter gun control. Likewise, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 Roosevelt was able to move swiftly to mobilize public support for America’s entry into World War II. Yet, despite the fact that critical periods provide important opportunities for leaders to change course and to drastically break with past policies, it is also clear that this is not the norm. One does not have to look far to find examples where disasters (natural or otherwise) either led to incremental change or to no change at all (e.g., the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, USA; Daley & Millane, 2020).

Aside from a willingness to act, what determines whether leaders are able to push for social change to enhance the post-disaster state of preparedness? The public policy literature on crises and windows of opportunities is helpful insofar as it identifies the conditions under which policy entrepreneurs are most likely to succeed. This literature also provides a wealth of knowledge about factors that may deter potential policy entrepreneurs from seizing the moment (e.g., over-dependence on industry partners and party donors). However, what is less well understood is why certain leaders decide to take risks and strive for policy change, while others prefer to “muddle through” and avoid risky policy implementation. It may be tempting to attribute an action or lack thereof to the idiosyncratic attributes of the leader in question and certainly much previous research has focused on the individual-level skills possessed by competent leaders in the aftermath of a disaster (e.g., decisiveness, flexibility, strategic planning ability; see Demiroz & Kapucu, 2012). Here, though, we take a different approach.

In line with the reasoning that disasters affect collectives and that emerging intra- and intergroup collective-level processes need to be understood to predict the post-disaster response, we focus on the role of capitalizing on these collective processes (see Figure 1). Perhaps most important for effective policy entrepreneurship is the extent to which leaders have a capacity to instill and harness a shared sense of belonging and shared fate (Haslam et al., 2011). Most particularly, we propose that leadership involves managing emerging social identities (i.e., the shared sense of “we” and “us” within members of a given group or community). Leaders that effectively implement social change are not only those that are able to read the emerging identity dynamics accurately but are also those who are able to mobilize and effectively channel these post-disaster group dynamics in ways that align policy changes with the wishes of the general public. Often, these wishes are not clearly developed and a leader’s role lies in constructing a compelling identity narrative that people can rally around and which brings them together. More specifically, this entails leaders being entrepreneurs of identity who develop and shape a particular sense of “us-ness” (Haslam et al., 2011; Reicher et al., 2005; Steffens et al., 2014). In this sense, leaders have an important role to play in defining what Tajfel referred to as cognitive alternatives to the status quo (Tajfel, 1978). These not only identify new possibilities for the future but also provide followers with an appreciation of how they might be achieved. Together, then, identity entrepreneurship and a sense of cognitive alternatives provide groups with a sense of new goals for which they can collectively strive (e.g., being better prepared for future environmental hazards).

To be able to do this, though, a number of preconditions need to be met. Above all else, it has been argued that for leaders to mobilize followers’ support they need to be perceived as “one of us” (identity prototypicality; Haslam et al., 2011; Hogg, 2001; Jetten et al., 2002; Reicher et al., 2005; Steffens et al., 2014; Turner & Haslam, 2001). In line with this point, leaders generally prove better able to mobilize support for change that builds upon emergent consensus when they can forge and then be seen to represent, superordinate identities that bridge intergroup divides (Mols, 2012; Platow et al., 2009). For example, after the Port Arthur massacre in which 35 people died at the hands of a lone gunman, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard was able to turn the politically divisive debate about gun control into one that focused on the shared public outcry in ways that united all political parties (including political parties on the right). This also led to legislation imposing strict national licensing requirements for gun owners and the banning of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns in Australia.

However, positioning oneself as the prototypical leader of an inclusive ingroup is only one of the preconditions for being able to implement policy change (Duck & Fielding, 2003; Ellemers et al., 2004; Haslam et al., 2011; Reicher et al., 2005). As Prime Minister John Howard noted in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre: “Heavens above, what’s the point of having a huge majority if you can’t do something with it” (cited in Blenkin, 2019). Leadership is thus also very much associated with action. In particular, it involves mobilizing public support that emerges from perceptions of a shared identity in the aftermath of a disaster to lock groups into material changes that help to realize their goal of enhancing the post-disaster state of preparedness. In this context, leaders’ actions need not only “craft a sense of us” (identity entrepreneurship) but also need to be understood as “doing it for us” (identity advancement) and “embedding a sense of us” (identity impresarioship; Steffens et al., 2014). So as well as marshaling an emergent sense of shared social identity, leaders need to leverage this as a platform for structural change (e.g., in policy and practice) that turns collective aspirations into group members’ lived reality. In this way, social identity theorizing suggests that effective post-disaster leadership (like all other forms of leadership) is a multi-dimensional process that centers on leaders’ capacity to create, advance, represent, and embed a shared sense of social identity for group members (Haslam et al., 2011; Reicher et al., 2005; Steffens et al., 2014; Van Dick et al., 2018).

The Post-Disaster Context of the 2019/2020 Australian Bushfires

Applying this reasoning to the post-disaster Australian bushfires context, we can ask whether the Federal Government’s leadership in the critical period after the fires led to social change or maintenance of the status quo. Although it is too early to provide a definitive answer to that question, commentators and policy experts (e.g., Delaney, 2020; Wallace, 2020) suggest that the government appears more likely to maintain the status quo than to seize the moment of national unity on the importance of acting on climate change. Rather than go down the social change pathway that has the potential to enhance the post-disaster state of preparedness, it thus seems more likely to go down the path of a post-disaster state of paralysis.

An inspection of media commentary also suggests that leadership, and in particular, the leadership of the Federal Government and its Prime Minister Scott Morrison is pivotal to understanding the post-disaster response. In line with social identity theorizing, there are a number of developments that suggest that the Prime Minister (either intentionally or by choice) has not been able to position himself as prototypical of emerging public opinion in the aftermath of the bushfire disaster. This has been consequential. While Scott Morrison enjoyed popularity as a Prime Minister in the months leading up to the bushfires (and was elected with a majority to continue as a Prime Minister in May 2019), his popularity dropped drastically during and after the bushfires. Specifically, on a scale from 1 to 10, his rating declined from 5.25 in June 2019 to 3.92 in January 2020 (Biddle et al., 2020).

There are a few factors that contributed to the Prime Minister no longer being seen as representative or prototypical of the Australian general public. First, at a personal level, he came to be regarded as lacking empathy and as being unable to connect emotionally with bushfire victims in ways that suggested he was not “one of us.” Reasons for this included a poorly timed overseas holiday (at the peak of the devastation caused by the bushfires) and clumsy interactions with bushfire victims (which made him seem out of touch and uncaring; Williamson, 2020).

Second, during and in the immediate aftermath of the bushfire disaster, the government’s loyalty seemed to continue to lie with the fossil fuel industry rather than with the victims of the bushfires (Grattan, 2019). This further enhanced the perception that the government’s priorities were not aligned with those of the general public. This created a new “us” (the concerned public) versus “them” (the Australian government) dynamic which in turn undermined the Prime Minister’s capacity for influence (in ways predicted by social identity theorizing; Turner, 1991).

Third, the government defended its inaction on climate change by pointing out that responsibility for fire-fighting lay with the Australian States, rather than with the Federal Government. Not only did this effectively remove the government from a leadership role in shaping the disaster response, but it also seemed inappropriate given the unprecedented scale of the bushfires across the country as a whole (affecting the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia, as well as the Australian Capital Territory). As a result, the government was criticized for failing to take on the leadership role that was clearly expected of it. That is, there was little evidence of the government “doing it for us” (identity advancement) or “embedding a sense of us” (identity impresarioship) in ways that might convince the public of its leadership credentials (Haslam et al., 2011; Steffens et al., 2014).

Given the difficulty or unwillingness (Grattan, 2019) of positioning himself as a prototypical leader of a new emerging shared identity (i.e., an Australia in which inaction on climate change was no longer acceptable), the Prime Minister was not able to craft, advance, and embed a sense of shared social identity among followers. As a result, attempts by the government to deal with the disaster on the ground (e.g., by bringing in the army to fight fires and committing more financial resources to fire-fighting operations) were met with little enthusiasm but rather seen as “too little, too late” (Daley & Millane, 2020). Furthermore, proposed policy changes by the Federal Government were also criticized because they were not seen as stemming from an ingroup. For example, its proposal that future bushfire threats might be effectively tackled through hazard reduction (e.g., back burning to reduce the amount of ‘fuel’ in the environment) were rejected out of hand by the Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons as inadequate to reduce pre-disaster vulnerability in any significant way (Wallace, 2020).

In the wake of the disaster, the main action by the government involved setting up a Royal Commission to examine the States and Territories’ preparedness and the Federal Government’s response to the disaster. The idea was that this should then lead to policy recommendations aimed at enhancing the post-disaster state of preparedness. However, this initiative was criticized on the grounds that since 1939 there have already been around 140 formal reviews and inquiries into bushfires and fire management and most of the recommendations of these earlier inquiries have not been implemented (Tolhurst, 2020). As one expert noted: “[this] raises serious questions about whether another Royal Commission will offer anything new or compelling” (Tolhurst, 2020). Although it cannot be said with certainty, it seems plausible that this initiative might have been received more warmly (and with less mistrust) if the general public had more confidence that the Prime Minister and his colleagues were coming from a place of wanting to swiftly improve bushfire preparedness in the post-disaster context.

In sum, appraising these events through the lens of SIMPDA (as set out in Figure 1), it appears that there is widespread agreement among commentators that the post-disaster bushfire context is one in which the status quo has, at least for now, been largely maintained. This is evident, for example, from the limited action on climate change and the limited implementation of policy changes to enhance the post-disaster state of preparedness. Furthermore, what social change has been implemented has been described as more cosmetic than real (e.g., the Royal Commission). While some of this can be explained by COVID-19, the next collective-level disaster that urgently demanded leaders’ attention, when it comes to the bushfire response, it is probably fair to say that Australia now finds itself – or, more accurately, has been led into – a state of post-disaster paralysis which is unlikely to improve pre-disaster vulnerability in the years to come. Thus, despite the magnitude of the disaster, this is a context where “the forces of inertia are powerful” (Wallace, 2020).

We hope that this forecast will not unfold in this way though and it is, therefore, important to develop a stronger knowledge base of leadership in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Even though we presented empirical evidence that supports parts of the model (e.g., Australia’s preparedness in the pre-disaster phase, attitudes toward leadership during the disaster), whether the processes identified in SIMPDA contributed in the predicted way to Australia’s post-disaster preparedness will only become evident in the years to come. Both qualitative and quantitative research will be important to shed light on whether and how the post-disaster context (contributing to preparedness or paralysis) feeds back into the preparedness for future bushfire seasons. While it is important to study these processes at a national level, there might also be value in locally-based case studies comparing contexts where local leadership failed or succeeded in better preparing the community for future disasters. By focusing on both successful as well as failed leadership we should be better placed to draw conclusions about how to futureproof Australia for future bushfire seasons.