Protective Decision-Making in Bushfire Part 1: A Rapid Systematic Review of the ‘Wait and See’ Literature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The intention to ‘wait and see’ before committing to evacuation or staying and defending during a wildfire event is notoriously dangerous and troublesome for residents, fire professionals, and emergency managers in fire-prone areas around the world. “The ‘Wait and See’ literature: A rapid systematic review” is a timely appraisal of wildfire evacuation delays due to wait and see as it is intended or implemented by fire prone populations in multiple countries. Planners and managers are grappling with how to promote desirable social change during evacuation (away from ‘wait and see’) in an increasingly flammable world, and—as the author points out—the organization’s/government’s goal is infeasible given what we known about individual behavior and decision-making in the fire-environment. However, the author proposes some ways we can still progress towards a safer fire-prone world by setting realistic goals and reframing our communication with fire-prone populations. A focused synthesis of the relevant literature is much needed. I found the assessment, suggestions, and conclusions helpful for identifying gaps in the literature and ways for fire-prone societies and fire researchers to move forward. I was excited to get the opportunity to review this article.

My comments and suggestions are largely related to formatting/punctuation and suggestions for additional references. A couple sentences were confusing, but the manuscript is largely well-written and the important points are largely presented clearly and concisely.

Line 88: CFA is not introduced as an acronym and some readers may not be familiar with the agency.

Lines 100-106—Is there a study, report, or data set that can be referenced here?

Line 150: references in this sentence are off—there may be some missing text or one of the reference lists may need to be removed.

Line 174-175: Formatting is off with the sections

Lines 185-192: verb agreement and punctuation shifts in this sentence and needs to be revised.

Lines 197-199: Please include some additional detail on the scope of emergency management practitioners and policy makers contacted. Was this a multi-nation contact effort, through a professional organization or association, or Australia-=specific contacts?

Line 206: “..and papers falling outside the criteria [were] excluded.”

Lines 208: In the final round of refining the paper pool, what were the criteria for paper exclusion? Suggestion of describing some the handful of exclusion reasons in-text here.

Line 232: were 3 of the final 40 somehow excluded from the qualitative analysis?

Line 247: Suggested word change for clarity: “Where elements of the summary provided in Table 2 an be used to elaborate particular results, the[y] are discussed in the text.”

Line “Through analysis of the number of codes and references generated through the thematic analysis of the papers, 11 of the papers were identified…”

This statement is confusing to me. Was the thematic analysis also quantitively coded (e.g., frequency of codes apparent) or is this referring to the number of codes appearing in the manuscript? Please clarify.

Also “and their cited references” “the number of codes and references” (Lines 256 an 257) is a bit confusing. Previously in the manuscript, you refer to references as papers referenced in the manuscripts you selected to snowball to find additional potentially-relevant papers. The SANRA criteria of “referencing” is mentioned briefly and not explained in-text (potentially due to word limits). If you have room, please expand on your in-text discussion of SANRA to mitigate reader confusion around “references” or “referencing” in different phases of your assessment.

Table 2, column 1, page 14: Handmer et all. 2016 should be Handmer et al. 2016

Table 2, Outcome Column, Whittakher et al. 2013 [5]: Outcome 5: verb edit suggestion:  “…greatly increased likelihood of dangerous late evacuation or becom[ing]/bec[a]me trapped in undefendable shelter.”

Table 2, Outcome Column, McLennan et al. 2013 [51], page 16, Outcome #10: the use of “wait and leavers” keeps consistent with the “wait and seers” discussion and a proposition of a new archetype, but is a bit confusing unless you are familiar with the terminology in the evacuation literature. Is there a different way to say that that will be more accessible to a wider audience?

Table 2, Outcome Column, McLennan et al. 2012 [41] page 16, Outcome 2: “…including inconvenience o[f] deviating from normal routines.”

Same item, Outcome 3: the start to this sentence is a little clunky to navigate. Can it be restated? It might just be adding a “The” at the start of the sentence.

Table 2, column 1, page 17. Edgeley et al. 2019 should be Edgeley and Paveglio 2019.

Table 2, Significance Column, Edgeley et al. 2019, Significance 1. Not certain if the  “However:” is meant to be there at the end.

Table 2, Study Objective column, Strahan 2020: No study objective?

Table 2 in general: please double check spacing (likely a product of conversion to a pdf by the journal) and style in this section. Sometimes periods are used at the end of each item in a list, other times not, and having a cleaner layout will help the reader better navigate the content.

Line 311—the acronym NSW begins being used, which seems obvious but could confuse some readers. You subsequently switch between the acronym and long-hand in your discussion.

Line 317—please write out WA to avoid confusion

Lines 413-417: this paragraph (starting with “Second, believe they can delay because they are confident…” seems to be missing a solid spot in the narrative flow. Is this meant to be nested somewhere? There is something off with the sentence structure here as well.

Lines 436-440: have a similar nesting issue.

Line 463: This may [be] due to the need to complete…

Line 536: “While fire agencies see decisive protective action as proving a solution…” Should this be “providing” a solution? This sentence, including the quoted excerpt, is a bit confusing and could use clarification.

Lines 551-569: if it is possible to change the formatting to a 1-6, rather than including the 3.7., that would help with reader cognition.

Lines 582-586: Please direct the reader to some references for this statement.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript addressed an important behavior pattern of people while responding to the risk of bushfire, which may cause disastrous consequences and unnecessary loss of lives. The authors synthesized 40 papers that focused on or included the study of people's 'wait and see' behavior during bushfires in Australia. The review is structured to 1) define the 'wait and see' behavior, 2) summarize findings on the grounds for concern for such behavior, 3) reasons of such delay, 4) the influence of information and warnings, 5) demographic factors and such behavior, 6) policy implications. The review provides a comprehensive summary on the existing findings based on the bushfires in Australia and important implications for policymakers to improve the fire-responding strategies and community education on fire response.

I enjoyed reading this review as the 'wait and see' behavior is a commonly found pattern in many countries. A review summarizing the existing studies on this topic is very rare, or mostly focusing on the North American experiences. The authors provided a valuable window for global researchers to better understand people's behavior towards bushfires in Australia so that they can compare these findings with their area of interest. It is a valuable addition to the existing scholarship on wildfire (bushfire) response.

I find the manuscript is well structured with a clear logic line for the audience to follow, which is always a challenge in most of the review papers. Synthesized papers are well-embedded in the entire manuscript with proper citation. In particular, the authors did a good job in Section 3.3 while summarizing the reasons people delay their decision-making during bushfires with the findings from existing papers.

The authors also included a diagram to illustrate how the core articles were selected, which is very helpful for scholars who are interested to conduct meta-analyses of a similar kind.

Overall, I recommend this manuscript to be accepted.

One suggestion of improvement:

As the manuscript only discusses studies focusing on bushfires in Australia, the title may also need to reflect this focus. The current title can be a little misleading as it may sound like a review for the 'wait and see' behavior during wildfires (bushfires) all over the world.

Author Response

Thank you for your review of the paper. I much appreciate the time and effort you have taken reading and reflecting on the this work. Your understanding of the relevance of the work to scholars and its importance to wildfire safety policy, is welcome.

In relation to your concern that the paper is restricted in its scope. My search process sought all papers in English but was not limited to Australian literature. Much of the scholarly research on this topic however is Australian because mandatory evacuation does not apply in the Australian context whereas it generally does in other international settings. While this is true the paper refers to 17 papers that are not Australian, representing 18% of the total reference list.

Therefore I would prefer not to amend the title of the paper 

Reviewer 3 Report

Due to the growing number of bush and forest fires every year, the topic of the article is topical. It is an overview and summarizes the research studies related to human response to the hazard of wildfires. The authors chose from among 255 identified in Scopus, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar databases, 40 according to the adopted criterion of the best source items on which they based their considerations. The general and specific comments to the reviewed article are provided below

General remarks:

1. The first page was incorrectly formatted. Line spacing is too large.
2. No paragraphs in all chapters and subsections.
3. All subsection titles should be aligned to the left margin.
4. No title for subchapter 2.1.
5. In many workplaces, the author uses sentences that are too long, which make it difficult to understand their content e.g. lines 130-135, lines 176-181, lines 185-192, lines 293-298, lines 299-308, lines 582-586.
6. In order to improve readability, many workplaces were better off using bullets instead of sentences containing alternative solutions e.g. lines 215-218, lines 266-269, lines 273-281, lines 400-404, lines 514-516, lines 622-626.
7. Table titles are not in accordance with the required template (dot instead of a colon after the word table and the font is too large). Moving tables is inconsistent with the adopted rules (no column numbering, no sequence "table nr continued" at the top of the table on the next page, no synchronization of the header with the page).
8. There are no page numbers.
9. There are many unnecessary gaps between texts dealing with the same topic.

• The space between the titles of chapters and subchapters and the text does not comply with the editor's requirements. Why the author did not use the "Template fire" file available on the publisher's website.
• The list of references was not compiled in accordance with the requirements (for example, the issue number was bolded instead of the year of publication, incorrect spaces between items, incorrect characters between authors, no abbreviations of journal names were used).

Detailed comments in chronological order:

Line 3 – the dot after the article title should be removed,

Line 31 - it would be advisable to complete the information on the location of the listed Victoria area, because the average reader will not know which area it is.

Line 43 - after New South Wales it is advisable to include the NSW abbreviation in brackets, as it is used later in this article,

Lines 51, 56 and 59 - maybe it would be better to use the words "Firstly", "Secondly" and "Thirdly" instead of "First", "Second" and "Third",

Line 57 - there is no space between "bushfire" and the references,

Lines 78-80 - better to use commas instead of repeating the word "and",

Line 84 - I suggest using "as well as" instead of repeating the word "and",

Line 88 - the word "Address" should be lowercase. Furthermore, the abbreviation CFA used for the first time should be explained,

Lines 95-98 - the text uses a smaller font and it does not fit to the left margin. I would suggest using italics,

Line 100 - The number in parentheses requires explanation, especially since it is fractional,

Line 150 – Source numbers enclosed in two parentheses can be combined and enclosed in one parentheses,

Line 185 - instead of at the end of the sentence it is better to put "in a newspaper or magazine" after "... had been published ..",

Lines 201-202 - the sentence uses the word "using" twice. It is advisable to correct the style of this sentence,

Line 204 – instead “data base” should be “database”,

Line 222 and 251 – Table 1 and Figure 1 should be placed as close as possible to sub-chapter 2.4,

Line 222 – The last column of the table 1 can be removed because the information placed there has already been given in the text,

Line 232 - Please explain more about the 37 data,

Line 242 - Table 2 should be placed as close as possible to sub-chapter 2.6,

Line 246–248 – The text should be modified,

Lines 299-307 - An illegible sentence separated by a table 2. It should be worded differently and divided into several smaller sentences. Part of the text after table 2 should be moved in front of the table to fill a largely blank page,

Line 299 - after the words "Western Australia" the abbreviation "WA", which is used later in the text, should be placed in parentheses,

Line 300 - The meaning of the percentages given in the text is unclear. This should be explained in more detail,

Line 317 - there is no space between "paper" and the number of the reference,

Line 330 - there are no spaces between words "threatened" and “(17%) as well as the number of the reference,

Line 389 – instead of “saliance” should be “salience”,

Lines 407 and 415 - maybe it would be better to use the words "Firstly", "Secondly" and "Thirdly" instead of "First", "Second" and "Third",

Line 420 - there are no space between word "routines" and the numbers of the references,

Line 505 - The title of subsection 3.6 is unfortunate. I propose to change it,

Lines 551-569 - Numbering should be aligned to the left margin. Also, instead of "3.7.1" it should be "1.", instead of "3.7.2." it should be "2" etc.

Lines 616-626 - the text between these lines uses a different space and font than the rest of the text,

Lines 627-638 - Due to the insufficient amount of text contained in chapter 5, I propose to transfer it to chapter 4, the text between lines 637 and 638, should be placed immediately after the last sentence in chapter 4.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Unfortunately, a part of the suggested corrections has not been taken into account. Points for improvement are listed below:

General comments:

1. The first page was incorrectly formatted. Line spacing is too large.
2. No paragraphs in all chapters and subsections.
3. No title for subchapter 2.1.
4. Table titles are not in accordance with the required template (dot instead of a colon after the word table and the font is too large). Moving tables is inconsistent with the adopted rules (no column numbering, no sequence "table nr continued" at the top of the table on the next page, no synchronization of the header with the page).
5. Page numbering starts not from the beginning of the article, but from the page with table 2.
6. There are many unnecessary empty lines between texts dealing with the same topic (e.g. lines 44,61,73,79,133,155,166,242,272,281,301,313,309,322,338,345)
7. The space between the titles of chapters and subchapters and the text does not comply with the editor's requirements. Why the author did not use the "Template fire" file available on the publisher's website.
8. The line numbers are repeated after table 2. Before the table, the row numbering ends with 319 and after the table, the next line is 304.
9. Table 1 as a whole should be placed on the same page.

• Why is the table title itself listed in lines 229-231 ?

Detailed comments in chronological order:

Line 222 – the last column of the table 1 is empty,

Lines 143, 304 and 315 - there are no space between text and the reference,

Line 304 - the sentence uses a double semicolon instead of a period.

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf