APN Bushfire Exposure Metric
One of five Substrate components. Measures bushfire hazard from two signals, each independently rank-normalised before averaging: fire-weather climatology (Forest Fire Danger Index) and historical fire incidence. Inverted so 100 = most resilient (lowest hazard).
Source: CSIRO NBIC Hourly FFDI historical climatology (44-year record, 1979–2022, ~11km grid, BARRA-R2 reanalysis) + Geoscience Australia historical bushfire incidence.
CSIRO labels the FFDI dataset explicitly “research-grade… provided solely for scientific and academic research purposes. Not intended for operational, commercial, or decision-making use.” APN’s use here is informational/analytical (a published structural-resilience indicator), not operational fire-safety decision-making — but the caveat is stated here directly rather than left implicit.
The FFDI licensing path originally sought (a Bureau of Meteorology product) was abandoned after a fee-waiver enquiry suggested an unfavourable cost-recovery outcome; this free, fully-open (CC BY 4.0) CSIRO alternative was found the same day and uses the same underlying McArthur FFDI formula family. Coverage is low-confidence for five offshore territories where the FFDI grid join distance is greater than expected.
Alignment with the pillar. Across the 6,791 localities scored on both, this component and APN Substrate™ (Climate Resilience Rating) (24150) have a correlation of 0.41, on a scale where 1 means the two scores move together exactly and 0 means they are unrelated. The two are loosely aligned: a locality’s score on this component says only a little about its overall Substrate score, and the component carries information the pillar’s other inputs do not.
Each bar is the average locality score in that jurisdiction, with every locality counted equally regardless of population; the dashed line marks the national mean of 71.67. Tasmania averages highest at 86.8 (319 localities) and the Northern Territory lowest at 49.8 (163). New South Wales averages 76.2, Victoria 76.0, Queensland 72.4, the Australian Capital Territory 63.1, South Australia 62.9 and Western Australia 56.8. Other Territories (4 localities) are not shown.
The other four components of APN Substrate™ (Climate Resilience Rating) (24150).
- Built with both FFDI climatology and historical incidence together from the start — no interim single-signal build was needed
- CSIRO research-grade licence caveat disclosed on every use
