What is the ‘appropriate’ fuel management regime for the Otway Ranges, Victoria, Australia? Developing a long-term fuel management strategy using the structured decision-making framework

The Otway Ranges contain many of the highest-wildfire-risk communities in Victoria, Australia. One of the chief risk mitigation measures in the Otway Ranges is planned burning. The location and amount of planned burning that is undertaken need to consider stakeholder perspectives that can be largely divergent, invoking difficult trade-offs for land-management agencies. The structured decision-making framework was utilised to select the most ‘appropriate’ 40-year cross-tenure fuel management strategy for the Otway Ranges. This paper details the approach undertaken to develop an optimised set of multi-objective fuel management strategies, identify suitable monetary and non-monetary objectives and calculate risk-weighted consequences using a range of modelling techniques. To underpin clarity in trade-offs and decision making, we emphasise the use of natural measures of performance for each candidate strategy against each objective, such as lives lost, species decline and economic losses associated with wildfire. This paper also highlights the role of stakeholder engagement throughout the decision-making process. We discuss the results of the formal trade-off process that was completed using an additive multi-objective value model to identify a preferred fuel management strategy for the Otway Ranges. The preferred strategy is currently used by local management agencies to guide operational planning and delivery.