2021 best paper awards

Journal of Safety Science and Resilience (JSSR) has introduced the best paper awards to recognise outstanding papers published in the journal. We are pleased to announce the recipients of the best paper awards for 2021. Nominations were chosen from all papers published between September 2020 and June 2021. After the reviewing each paper, an appointed selection committee agreed on awarding the following papers.

1^st Place Award: (800 USD)

• Impact of Australia's catastrophic 2019/20 bushfire season on communities and environment
  Alexander I. Filkov, Tuan Ngo, Stuart Matthews, Simeon Telfer and Trent D. Penman
  Journal of Safety Science and Resilience, Volume 1, Issue 1, September 2020

2019/20 Australia's bushfire season (Black Summer fires) occurred during a period of record breaking temperatures and extremely low rainfall. To understand the impact of these climatic values we conducted a preliminary analysis of the 2019/20 bushfire season and compared it with the fire seasons between March 2000 and March 2020 in the states of New South Wales (NSW), Victoria, and South Australia (SA). It showed that the smoke from the bushfires may be a significant concern in the future for the global community, as it travels to other countries and continents. Based on preliminary data, it will take many years to restore the economy and infrastructure in impacted areas, and to recover animal and vegetation biodiversity.

2^nd Place Awards: (500 USD)

• An internet of things assisted drone based approach to reduce rapid spread of COVID-19
  Mohit Angurala, Manju Bala, Sukhvinder Singh Bamber, Rajbir Kaur and Prabhdeep Singh
  Journal of Safety Science and Resilience, Volume 1, Issue 1, September 2020

In this paper, a mechanism is proposed called DBCMS (Drone Based Covid-19 Medical Service) for the safety of medical employees who are prone to Covid-19 infection. The proposed mechanism can effectively improve the treatment process of Covid-19 patients. Drones are nowadays commonly used in the field of medical emergency situations. The proposed model in this paper uses drone service to reduce the risk of infection to the doctors or other medical staff, thereby preventing the disease spread. This paper further assumes that the primary step is to isolate people at their home instead of admitting them to the hospitals, also called a situation of lockdown or curfew. Thus, in this way, the spread can be significantly reduced across the globe if DBCMS approach is implemented at cluster level.

• A discussion of irrational stockpiling behaviour during crisis
  Yiqun Chen, Abbas Rajabifard, Soheil Sabri, Katie Elisabeth Potts, Farhad Laylavi, Yuke Xie and YiboZhang
  Journal of Safety Science and Resilience, Volume 1, Issue 1, September 2020

One of the ubiquitous human behaviours observed in natural disasters and humanitarian crisis is irrational stockpiling (also known as hoarding or panic buying). Limited, distorted and exaggerated information during crisis disturbs people's judgement and results in aberrant actions which can be explained with economics and psychology theories. The objective of this paper is to examine the perplexing stockpiling phenomena during disasters like COVID-19 pandemic and discuss its immediate and long-term impact on economy, society and local communities.

On behalf of the journal’s selection committee and the editorial board, we would like to congratulate the authors of the above manuscripts. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our authors for their continued support.