In September 2020, Lew Short led a series of national workshops in each State and Territory for the Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) which is a nationally significant project to design and implement a new Fire Danger Rating (FDR) system for Australia.
The AFDRS Board recognised that there is a significant amount of work to be undertaken across the jurisdictions to understand the implications of potential change including complexity, costs and time to effect change.
The national workshops engaged with land and fire management agencies, and other sectors such agriculture, transport, education, health, energy providers, local government and defence. Across each State and Territory 181 people representing 90 different agencies and industry bodies participating.
As facilitator, Lew’s role was to help workshop participants people move through a nationally consistent process together that fleshed out jurisdictional issues.