The Inspector-General for Emergency Management recommends that the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (or the single entity referenced in Recommendation 4) lead the development and distribution of evidence-based land and fuel management tools for use by all legislated fuel management organisations to ensure a common approach to fuel management.
DELWP has recently developed methods to measure the specific contribution of fuel management to risk reduction, improving Victoria’s ability to measure the effectiveness of fuel management in reducing bushfire risk.
Across 2020–21 FFMVic has worked to model the relative contributions of planned burning and bushfires to reductions in bushfire risk. This information was included in FFMVic's Managing Victoria’s bushfire risk: Fuel management report 2019–20 with plans to include it in future reports. The report is available at ffm.vic.gov.au/fuel-management-report-2019-20 (External link)
The modelling highlights how effective fuel management can be in reducing bushfire risk, especially when compared to the scale of bushfire required to achieve a similar reduction.
FFMVic's analysis has been independently examined by the University of Melbourne. Its examination observed that while there will never be a perfect method for measuring risk, the method used for the analysis can be justified based on current research results.