Serendipity leads to serious scientific success

27 October 2024
Tony Walter.JPG
Tony Walter

By Isis Symes

When Townsville-based CQUniversity Public Health research student Tony Walter applied for his PhD while the city was flooded by a natural disaster, little did he know his research would lead to a national award win.

“I started in 2019 and when I was applying to CQU for the project acceptance, Townsville was flooded,” Mr Walter explained. 

“Looking back at it - and I didn’t know at the time - my research is about this. Climate change was behind this significant event, development occurred on a well-known floodplain and these people did not know they were in a vulnerable zone or their risks, and did not evacuate,” he said.

Mr Walter’s PhD thesis is exploring how to build community resilience through disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation - and he applied that theory to his winning report in Environmental Health Australia’s (EHA) World Environmental Health Day (WEHD) competition.

“The title of my winning report for this theme was Using health prevention lens to build community resilience in a changing climate,” Mr Walter explained.

“Currently, environmental health is an immediate disaster response and recovery function only but there are many opportunities to feature long before, and after, the hazardous event.”

Mr Walter said members of EHA were asked to highlight how environmental health was crucial in disaster risk reduction using the WEHD theme of Creating Resilient Communities through Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

“This is a novel topic because currently environmental health does not feature in doing any of this, but they can and should be part of it,” he said.

Mr Walter said what was currently lacking was any understanding of the risks that manifest within a local community. 

“The community does not understand their risks until it is too late or doesn't listen to warnings,” he said. 

“Instead of focusing exclusively on emergency response - prevention also has been proven to be an effective approach for managing human health risks and is well-known in the field of environmental health. However, health prevention in stopping and/or reducing people getting sick or injured is vastly left out of the disaster management discussion.”

Mr Walter said that while disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation had similar goals, they were often seen as separate approaches. 

“They can and should be integrated in health, but empirical research in this is largely lacking so that is why this research is important.” 

While completing his PhD part-time, during the day Mr Walter is an Environmental Health Officer at the Townsville City Council where he has worked for the past 17 years.

“Prevention to emergency management is more than preventing a flood - which we cannot - so instead we need to move to preparation on how to respond,” Mr Walter said. 

“Environmental health is the only profession in Australia that provides population health protection to the community at the local level and could assist in driving bottom-up community resilient approaches.”  

Alongside his CQUniversity supervisory team of Dr Lisa Bricknell, Dr Robyn Preston and Dr Elise Crawford, Mr Walter has already published two journal articles including Perspectives of environmental health officers on climate change adaptation in Australia: a cross-sectional survey and Climate Change Adaptation Methods for Public Health Prevention in Australia: an Integrative Review

“I am undertaking an ambitious sequential mixed method design with three separate data collection phases. This year I was able to publish my integrative review and phase 1 survey results, and I am currently in phase 2 interviewing key informants with high-level disaster management experience,” he said.

“I am about 60 per cent the way through and will be pushing the time to finish to the limit.”

Find out more about CQUniversity’s research opportunities or apply for a CQU PhD today.