Protective Decision-Making in Bushfire Part 2: A Rapid Systematic Review of the ‘Leave Early’ Literature
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Manuscript ID: fire-1283428
Type of manuscript: Review
Title: A rapid systematic review of the 'leave early' literature.
Authors: Kenneth William Strahan, John Gilbert
The authors identified, analysed and summarised 90 works reporting research findings about householders’ timely evacuation in the face of bushfire threat. They have: (a) noted a lack of clarity in accounts of what it means to leave “early”, (b) identified important issues influencing householders’ decisions about leaving under bushfire threat, and (c) suggested implications for agencies in their endeavours to improve community bushfire safety going into a worsening bushfire threat future driven by anthropogenic climate change.
Following the disastrous Victorian ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires of 2009, an immediate challenge for Australia’s fire, emergency services and environmental agencies was the dearth of research about community bushfire safety. This lead to a burst of research activity, first about the 2009 fires and subsequently following other major bushfires in NSW, SA, Tasmania, and WA, 2011—2018. The authors of the current manuscript have made a major contribution with their review of a now considerable body of research about at-risk householders’ decisions to leave ‘early’—that is, before bushfire threat to life is imminent.
I have no major substantive critical issues with the paper. Below I offer some comments for the authors to consider with a view to possibly improving some aspects of the paper.
Introductory material: I think it would be appropriate to include reference to the two early reviews of social science wildfire research which set something of a precedent for endeavouring to extract general learnings from a body of research about particular community safety issues:
McCaffrey S, Toman E, Stidham M, Shindler B. Social science research related to wildfire management: an overview of recent findings and future research needs. Int J Wildl Fire. 2013;22:15–24. https://doi.org/10.1071/WF11115
- McCaffrey, Community wildfire preparedness: a global state-of-the-knowledge summary of social science research, Curr. For. Rep. 1 (2015) 81–90, https://doi. org/10.1007/s40725-015-0015-7.
Page 2, line 69: replace “…in bushfires.” with ‘…when threatened by bushfire’.
Page 2, line 72: replace “..and how to..” with “…in order to…’.
Page 2, line 83. With respect, there is a non-trivial difference in safety implications between leaving the previous day or on the morning of a predicted Code Red/Catastrophic Fire danger day, and not knowing what to do! I recommend stating the separate percentages for those reporting each of these circumstances.
Page 4, line 153. The account of uncertainties in the use of the term “leave early” probably warrants some expansion. Some fire agencies do use ‘leave early’ to mean leave the previous day or early in the morning before there are any bushfire warnings.
Table 2: I think this needs re-formatting. At present, it is very taxing for a reader to process multiple lines of text in a very narrow column. If the authors wish to include so much text, then perhaps the format should be varied from the PICOT framework they have adopted.
Referencing: this needs careful checking. I noted at least two instances of duplication: [43] and [123], [33] and [46] and I was not actually checking for duplications.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments and insights. We agree with them all
We have cited the two McCaffrey reviews recognising the precedent established by them in extracting research learnings on community safety issues.
Page 2, line 69: we have replaced “…in bushfires.” with ‘…when threatened by bushfire’.
Page 2, line 72: we have replaced “..and how to..” with “…in order to…’.
Page 2, line 83. We have separated the proportion of those saying they left in response to FDR warnings (8.1%) from those who did not know (0.9%).
Page 4, line 153. The account of uncertainties in the use of the term “leave early” has been expanded.
Table 2: We understand formatting issues will be addressed by the editors in pre-publication.
References. Duplicates have been removed.
Reviewer 2 Report
Well written and referenced article and easy to follow. It can serve as a reference point for further work.
The only negative comment is the presentation of primary studies of "leave early" on chapter 3 (Results).
The way in which it was chosen to list the summarized elements of the primary papers (table 2) is very difficult to handle and not at all effective, as for some papers the column "findings" exceeds 4 pages in length while in total the table 2 covers almost 20 pages.
The authors should provide the necessary information in a shorter and more comprehensive way.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments and insights. We agree with them all
Table 2: We understand formatting issues will be addressed by the editors in pre-publication.
