Strengthening Destinations’ Resilience from Bushfires—A Study of Eastern Australia

Climate change has brought people’s attention in recent decades, which demonstrates a critical phenomenon of increased natural disaster risks. The consequences of natural hazards are highly potential to bring significant economic, reputational, social, and environmental impacts on Australia’s tourism industry. Considering the close relationship between the unique natural environment and the local tourism industry, natural disasters always play critical roles in terms of the destinations’ resilience. This paper aims to examine the cause-and-effect of natural disaster resilience for the tourism industry in Eastern Australia with the particular concern of bushfire. Representative bushfire events will be studied to locate the industry’s preparedness and the existed action gaps mainly with the focus on government and destination management organizations, as well as discuss the disaster prevention implications, direct/indirect impacts and tourism-related issues. Also, a natural disaster resilience assessment framework for the industry will be developed with the key indicators from multiple aspects. A couple of future directions will be proposed regarding recovery methods, including the needs of destination image recovery, supportive policies for small businesses and cross-functional partnership.


Background
It is recognised that climate change has triggered an increasing phenomenon in the frequency and severity of extreme weathers such as heatwave/drought, bushfire and cyclone/floods (RossellóR, Becken, & Santana-Gallego, 2020). The impacts of natural disasters on social development and human activities have led to calls for improving disaster resilience, meaning households, communities, and businesses' capacity to cope with and adapt to natural hazards' shocks and stresses (Ruane, 2020). Among the multiple natural disasters happen around Eastern Australia, it is evident that bushfire always causes the most significant loss of natural capital and tend to have long-term impacts on the ecosystem and nearby societies. Tourism, an industry that highly relies on weather and natural resources, is significantly sensitive to the challenges brought by environmental risks (Siddiqui & Imran, 2019). Therefore, it is worthy of note that the industry is highly nature-based and depending on various natural assets. To enhance regional tourism resilience and improve destinations' restoration capabilities regarding the consequences of natural hazards, both the government and community are expected to better understand the major natural disasters regarding the characteristics and impacts (Pyke, De Lacy, Law, & Jiang, 2016).
Based on Köppen-Geiger climate classification, Queensland climate can be categorised into six major climate zones-the equatorial, tropical, subtropical, grassland, temperate, and dessert. The unique landscapes attract a considerable number of visitors, but the natural disasters caused by severe climate event is an unavoidable challenge for the development of the tourism industry. In 2019 and 2020, Queensland encountered several extreme weather conditions -the rainfall of the northeast tropical area was above average, while the continuous sunny weather and delayed onset of Australia monsoon made the inland regions experiencing high temperature and dryness. Moreover, bushfires around the Eastern Coast caused catastrophic consequences such as the Blue Mountain (New South Wales, 2019) and Fraser Island (Queensland, 2020) tragedies. Apart from the common factors including weather, terrain, oxygen, and vegetation which act as fuel for the rising of fire, the 2019−2020 Australian bushfire season resulted from the combination of natural factors and human activities. It started from mild fire spots caused by lightning strikes and human behaviours in forestry areas, such as discarded burning cigarette butts and alleged arson from camping/picnic barbecuing (Ryan, 2020). The fires then were enhanced by adverse natural conditions like widely distributed combustible eucalyptus, heatwave influences and low rainfall (UNWTO, 2020). Additionally, the positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), also known as Indian Nino, is a critical factor to blame for Australia's early drought and bushfire season (Ceranic, 2019). IOD is usually triggered by the changing seawater temperature and impacts weather patterns like El Nino/La Nina in the Pacific. The unnormal long-term dryness and extreme heat linked with IOD effects can also be regarded as the strengthening elements for the 2019−2020 bushfire.
The further consequences and secondary disasters resulting from this fire season are even more complex. Firstly, climate change and natural disasters are interlinked with each other, which means the fire season was caused by climate change but also reinforced and accelerated the progress of climate change with the significant emission of carbon dioxide (Gramling, 2020). Data shows that the production of CO 2 from the fires was equivalent to the sum of annual emissions of the 161 countries with the lowest greenhouse emissions in the world, which was even more than Australia's usual annual carbon emissions (Morton, 2020). In early 2020, it was noticed that the smoke and dust from the Australia bushfire crossed the ocean and covered the whole southland of New Zealand with yellow sky and smoke-smelling air (MacManus, 2020). The smoke was later detected approximately 11,000 kilometres away from Australia, around the territories of South America, including Chile, Argentina and Brazil. Moreover, the increasing temperature caused by global warming also led to high evaporation and seawater acidification, damaging the marine ecosystem by the consequences of coral bleaching and decreased marine biodiversity.
Considering the tourism sector, the tourists, especially those from overseas, were scared by the mass evacuation, destroyed natural attractions and downgraded air quality, and cancelled their trip plans including hotel and flight bookings (Chalmers, 2020). The majority of the holiday cancellations were from Australia's key tourist markets, the US, UK, and China (Thiessen, 2020), which cost the industry approximately $4.5 billion related to the tourists' concern of safety issues and the uncertainty of destinations' recovery (Carruthers, 2020). The fires also damaged infrastructures, historical sites and hotels/resorts. For example, a historical heritage accommodation, Binna Burra Lodge in the Gold Coast hinterland (Sapwell, 2019), was almost destroyed. Moreover, there were mass losses of natural resources, like wildlife species and forestry vegetation, which needed a long time for the natural habitats to recover. The United Nations' research showed that more than 18 billion hectares had been burnt as of January 2020, along with approximately millions of animals been killed (UNEP, 2020). With a vast amount of flora and fauna destroyed, experts suggested the affected ecosystem may needs centuries to be fully recovered (Claughton, 2020). Since natural resources are recognised as the top attractions for Australia's tourism industry, the damaged wildlife and vegetation, and the worsening air condition significantly affected the quality of tourism experiences (Wilks, 2020). Even the major fires were not happening in big cities, the floating smoke and dust still impacted Brisbane (Pollard, 2019) and Sydney's (Taylor, 2019) usual socioeconomic activities. The national and regional destination images of Australia was affected due to certain burnt areas' international exposures (Schweinsberg, Darcy, & Beirman, 2020).
To further understand the issues regarding regional natural disaster resilience issues and tourism-related impacts, this paper focuses on the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, due to the area's important status in Australia's tourism industry. Another extreme fire case study looks into the Fraser Island, Queensland, which discusses the current gaps regarding the industry's resilience to bushfires. In February 2020, the east coast of NSW and the Blue Mountains regularly opened for businesses and were recovered naturally, yet the market did not come back. According to the co-owner of the new Jervis Bay Brewing Company (an NSW based beer house), "the whole area is screaming for people to come back" (Hennessy, 2020). A bus tour operator in NSW commented, "In 45 years, I have never seen any downturn like this" (Chalmers, 2020). Meanwhile, many nations upgraded travel alerts for Australia, such as the US (Whinnett, 2020), making the tourism industry harder to turn back to normal. The local tourism operators also lost their businesses due to direct impacts from the fire. For instance, during the Christmas and New Year's break, thousands of tour operators were forced to evacuate from the south coast of NSW (Hennessy, 2020). Moreover, a popular attraction of the Blue Mountains, Scenic World, lost 50% visitors (50,000 fewer) in December 2019 compared to 2018, while the number of visitors climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge declined 15−20%. A staff of the Blue Mountains Backpacker Hostel in Katoomba complained that the number of busloads customers had fallen from 20 to 4 on a daily average (AusLeisure, 2020).

The Fraser Island, Queensland
Though Australia's overall bushfire situation has become relieved after the 2019-2020 bushfire season, there were still occasionally happened fires around the east coast caused by both human activities and natural conditions. In October 2020, tourists set campfire illegally in the Fraser Island, which became a big blaze lately and destroyed approximately 1/2 of the World Heritage Listed sand island (more than 87,000 hectares) within the next two months. Located off the eastern coast of Queensland, Fraser is the world's largest dune island with unique ecosystems and was designated as UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and Ramsar site (Feng, 2020). It has impressive inland rainforest of Kauri pines, giant ferns, and turpentine trees that may live for thousands of years. Due to the precious environment, Fraser Island is the habitat of diverse species, from native birds to flying foxes, skinks, sea turtles, and wild dingoes (Welch, 2020). The fire negatively affected the Island's tourism market and damaged considerable natural resources. It threatened and damaged the rainforests, trees growing in the sand and with a maximum height of 150 metres. Although winds did not force the fire to get worse, the slow movement was still horrible and showed how big it was. Since the authorities were struggling to control the significant fires, visitors and tour operators were told to stay away from Fraser Island and the businesses were shut temporarily. Although the tourism businesses on the Island are limited, it is still critical for both the government and the industry to think more about visitor management issues regarding tourism behaviour intervention and disaster-related supportive actions.
As the destination is an isolated semi-primitive island and lacks public infrastructure and transportation systems, the fire control works were facing a struggle which made it missed the best opportunities. Later, when the fire management works became a big problem, the national legislation sides, including the federal Environment Department started cooperating with Queensland Fire and Emergency Services for fire controlling and damage assessment works and finally contained the significant fires in mid-December (Dennien, 2020). The fires have been provoked by the extended winter dry season warmed by climate change. Apparently, the following heatwave and drought situations associated with the consequences of the previous bushfire also increased the risks of more fires, which could enhance the harmful effects of this chain reaction. This change could make the vegetation grow faster so that the fires get uncontrollable fast before been noticed (Welch, 2020). The following rainy season relieved the fire situation a lot; however, it still caused soil erosion to scour heavy rainfall, and the floods washed the fragile land surface (Paul & Barrett, 2020). It was also reported that the Great Barrier Reef experienced the third mass coral bleaching in the last five years, which was believed to be one more consequence of the catastrophic bushfire due to the reinforcements of global warming (The Climate Council, 2020).
Similar to the trigger of the tragic Binna Burra fire in 2019 that was possibly started by a cigarette butt, visitors' action was also blamed for the Fraser Island fire in 2020. Meanwhile, the related governmental departments' actions were also criticised in terms of their work efficiency and effectiveness. Voices blamed the state government and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service for a perceived delay in escalating efforts to fight the bushfires. In order to stop fire spreading, reinforcements were sent to consolidate the control lines across the Island due to the expected wind direction changes.  2. Source: https://www.iba.gov.au/bushfire-crisis-support/; 3. Source: https://www.ragtrader.com.au/news/14-million-funding-boost-for-nsw-business-connect-program; 4. Source: https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/apply-bushfire-recovery-grant-directly-impacted-small-businesses; 5. Source: https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/apply-small-business-bushfire-support-grant; 6. Source: https://businessinglen.com.au/event/small-business-bushfire-information-session.

The Gap Between Supportive Practices and Industry's Needs
The government supported the tourism industry to address with brushfires' impacts by putting 152 billion Australian dollars. Seventy-six million was distributed to local communities' mental health support and job injection in tourism and hospitality. Fifty million were granted for wildlife recovery and habitat restoration. There were also marketing campaigns launched to boost the industry's confidence, including 76 million Australian dollars with 20 million in domestic, 25 million for global marketing and 10 million towards creating new attractions in bushfire affected regions around the country. Regardless of NSW's actions showed by Table 2 and the national supports, there are five main guidelines for funding in Queensland-the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA), State Disaster Relief Arrangements (SDRA), Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements (NDRRA), Queensland Disaster Resilience Fund, and Get Ready Queensland Funding. Each of the guidelines articulates the eligible disasters and application criteria and are divides applicants into several categories, including small businesses, personal hardships, non-profit organisations, communities, government departments and agencies. Resilience funding mainly focuses on infrastructure and non-infrastructure mitigation projects while the Get Ready Queensland fund focuses on building community resilience. All plans are guidelines for local, regional government and community recovery for bushfire impacted areas or regions and each focus on working with local governments and communities to ensure the affected businesses and communities to obtain enough resources. Some other approaches include market campaigns, public awareness campaigns, and reconstruction projects are also distributed to increase tourism confidence after disasters. The highly integrated partnerships between the community and groups at different levels (local, district, jms.ccsenet.org Journal of Management and Sustainability Vol. 11, No. 2;2021 state and Commonwealth levels) are key to achieving ideal outcomes.
Regarding the post-crisis supports, the small and medium enterprises might be struggling with selecting multiple policies, while it is also complicated for assessors to determine the approvals. Sometimes it is hard to carry out the policies smoothly, and those who urgently need assistance may not have the chance. Media reports demonstrated that as of early March 2020, 738 applicants in NSW, VIC and SA applied for the small business-focused relief package, though only 147 were successfully granted, along with 5 out of 104 applicants for concessional loans approved (Keating, 2020). Also, the cluster of mass information might stop the businesses from applying-it is frustrating for people to find out the most suitable offers and the eligibility guides are likely to confuse the applicants. Besides, SMEs' focus needs to be enhanced as they tend to be independent and usually have fewer financial capabilities than big companies. While big businesses attract more attention, SMEs are playing significant roles in providing tourism-related services. If they choose to close their businesses and exit the market because of insurmountable difficulties (incl. financial, social, mental issues), it could become another hit for the destination's recovery. As the federal government also initiated marketing campaign and event leverage programs, the local community and SMEs' involvements also need to be valued to fully achieve the objectives. Moreover, all the recovery plans could be activated only when a certain amount of government expenditure has been exceeded and requires multi-agencies responses, which leads to a lack of attention to small-scale disasters with high frequency. The current practices can also cause a burden for communities with less economic mitigation and recovery resources.
The gaps between the current situation and the ideal implementations are various. Firstly, many tourism operators do not have enough skills, knowledge and resources for natural disaster preparedness and resilience, especially those based in rural areas that usually have less public and government attention. Secondly, the current government-initiated policies and funds should contain sufficient support for small-scale, high-frequency disasters, such as focusing on second disasters and the indirect impacts of bushfire. The lack of a systematic approach for rebuilding destination image is another critical issue of natural disasters associated with the tourism industry, which is also an essential point to invest resources for attracting visitors back after adverse events.

Conclusion: The Assessment
There is no doubt that bushfire is a vital disaster for tourism and the overall environment. The chain reactions show that bushfire creates a weather circle associated with other weathers and disasters (The National, 2020), such as rainfall, drought, heatwave and soil erosion. Unfortunately, tourism activities in Eastern Australia strongly rely on the weather and the natural environment. In terms of bushfire's severe consequences, forestry desertification and the decrease of wildlife amount indicate that tourism resilience is likely to be weaker under bushfire damage and its long-term recovery timeframe.
When the bushfire became severe in Australia, another vast fire was happening on the other side of the world-the 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires. Interestingly, the Amazon regions have similar geographic features (eastern continent), climate classifications (tropical and subtropical zones) and current ocean features (the exchange of cool and warm surface flow) with Australia's east coast. Meanwhile, during August and September 2019, both areas were experiencing dry seasons. The Amazon wildfire should have brought people's attention to Australia's bushfires, but it did not. Although bushfire is part of Australian ecosystem's natural laws, the alert toward destructive fire potential is still necessary.
The criticism is about neglect of public awareness, especially at the early stage. Binna Burra Lodge's tragedy shows that although all crisis management procedures and equipment were prepared and the executive team had the latest fire safety training, the property still did not escape from the disaster (Griffith University, 2019). On Friday, Sept 06 2019, the lodge expected a 100% occupancy rate even though the staff had noticed a fire in the valley several days before. Some forest-based activities were cancelled before that weekend due to the high fire potential, while the lodge had less intention of evacuation until the fire nearly accessed the property. Similar things happened a lot which the fire went out of control and destroyed infrastructures/properties because people did not recognise the danger.
For tourism destinations with wide varieties of natural resources and multiple geographical features, sustainability and tourism resilience depend very much on destination management practices and the adaptation to climate change (UNEP, 2008). As discussed earlier in this paper, the natural disasters in Eastern Australia are connected closely with the effects of climate change. Natural disasters generally result in multiple negative impacts on tourism and damage the destination's economy accordingly. Understanding the interrelationships between extreme weathers and tourism sector could help destinations with managing critical issues and implement recovery, restoration, and marketing practices (RossellóR, Becken, & Santana-Gallego, 2020).  Vol. 11, No. 2;2021 businesses.

Establish Tourism-Focused Disaster Relief Command Group
While the government has developed several tourism recovery plans to support the regions that heavily rely on tourism, problems are still reported, including the complexity of applications, the waiting time for approvals, and less attention to small and remote businesses. Especially for the small business owners who may lack education and relative knowledge, the complicated application process could be a considerable challenge. The hold-ups of funding distribution could cause more tourism businesses and natural assets to be impacted. During the 2019−2020 Australian bushfire season, more than 700 bushfire-affected businesses applied for government funds, but only 147 were approved on time which also caused dissatisfaction from the community (Keating, 2020). Additionally, some small businesses that were not directly damaged by natural disasters but hugely impacted by the decrease in tourists' number and expenditure, were being ignored.
It is suggested that the tourism-focused disaster relief command group should be established. This group is responsible for providing official consultations for funding applications, especially for those who need particular application assistance. A clear explanation for these applicants could lead to a higher approval ratio and more efficient approval. Another vital role of the command group is to actively track the progress of funding and any updates of policies so more timely assistance for the affected tourism businesses could be delivered, and more businesses would survive.

Enhance Partnership
Tourism resilience is a systematic approach and needs to be considered in a broader community context. The concept of community resilience relates to stakeholders' collaborations and coordination within their social and economic functions. Many international Non-Governmental Organisations and commercial companies have provided services and products that can help small and medium tourism enterprises to recover from natural disasters' negative impact. The issues require the government to play a leadership role to integrating all the available resources to build bridges for those international/interstates NGOs, commercial companies and destination to improve community resilience.
For example, Tourism Tropical North Queensland and Tourism Queensland have launched marketing campaigns after Cyclone Larry, and commercial organisations like EarthCheck provided professional consulting services in terms of crisis management and mitigation strategies (Earthcheck, 2019). The key was to help tourism operators to access and optimise existing services to recover efficiently. It can be delivered as seminars or supportive workshops by inviting experts to share their insights and recovery instructions. Alternatively, build an online information platform for natural-disaster resilience might be helpful as well.

Publicity and MICE Leveraging
As discussed above, the destination's reputation could be seriously damaged by bushfires which is able to resulting in significant tourism loss. Due to adverse reports in the media, tourists may have negative attitudes toward the destinations by seeing the shocking pictures and videos. In the case studies, destination image rebuilding plays an essential role in post-disaster recovery. Therefore, the related government, organisations and institutions, as well as communities should consider establishing a series of marketing campaigns, aiming to rebuild positive images, correct negative impressions, or even create new destination images.
One of the methods is to restore visitors' confidence and operate business as usual (or open and ready for business) among post-disaster marketing campaigns, which will effectively restore the destination's attractiveness in tourists' minds. Another method is celebrity endorsements with evident effect to boost visitors' return to the destination, and shift the media's attention from the incidents to business events and recreational activity promotions by maintaining a high-profile to attract potential visitors. The government could host various types of meetings, incentives and conventions after disaster, which will benefit the region's leisure recovery.

More Attention to Small and Remote Communities
Due to insufficient supportive capacity and limited financial support, disasters also add catastrophic impacts on small and medium enterprises. Playing a critical role in innovation, employment and social inclusion, SMEs are vital to economic resilience. It has been realised that the function of disaster response on the SME level is more effective than the industrial prevention system. Therefore, in order to build the confidence of industry recovery, not only financial assistance but also mental support and social opportunities should be considered to encourage small and remote communities' recovery. Besides, appropriate insurance processes ensure that the related insurance companies could share SMEs' recovery burden after a disaster. As long as the small businesses is able to getting sustainable guarantee of recovery continuously after disasters, the economy can bounce back to the development level before disasters as soon as possible.

Limitations
There are still critical challenges occupied with the planning and implementation of tourism resilience and recovery. Possible obstructions include the difficulties of funding approvals which need discussions among multiple government levels, and different benefits and opinions among stakeholders, as well as the various requirements for preparedness with the scope of various natural hazard types. Controversial and debatable aspects also exist with the consideration of strategy development. For instance, communication and language barrier issues are likely to occur during evacuation. The tourists who do not speak the local language sometimes are not able to fully understand the live instructions, which causes unnecessary losses for the businesses and potential harm to the tourists. The difficulties for tourism resilience are mostly about preventing bushfires regarding the lack of awareness and multiple fire spots at the early stages. Due to the huge cover of Eastern Australia's forest with limited residents, it could be hard to monitor fires. It is suggested that during the peak seasons of bushfire, the regional departments of hazard control could apply the technology with drones to make patrol inspections and inform the tour operators with the attention of potential danger. However, this application might be a violation of the nearby community's rights to privacy. More containment lines can help with bushfire relief, but the conduct is debatable as it may impair the forests and require parliament approvals to make the final decisions. Some destinations established museums and exhibition centres to showcase the past events of natural disasters and serve tourists and local communities about the disasters' impacts. The concern with this relates to ethical conduct-it might offense the residents who may never fully recover from the tragedies. Additionally, live disaster monitoring and information Apps can be designed to apply good intentions. However, it requires a level of trust, goodwill and proven effectiveness, as these interventions need both broad-scale community awareness and individuals' willingness to download the apps.