Tom is passionate about translating high quality research into useful, usable products for organisations, government and the community. His research within the Climate Futures teamfocus’s on transforming high-resolution climate information into decision useful products. The teams approach requires co-development of research projects with our stakeholders, regular updates and progress reports, which are aimed to inform stakeholders while upskilling those we engage with. This facilitates the rapid uptake of our outputs. An example is the Forest Fire Danger Index, an index used operationally by fire managers to assess the weather related risk of fire at any given moment. We used this operational tool as the vehicle to describe how the distribution of Forest Fire Danger Index changes into the future. This presents climate change impacts in a language fire managers instantly understand and can immediately action. It allows fire managers to better select the strategic investments they need to make now, in order to secure a safer future for our communities.  The Climate Futures team has done similar assessments for future change to dry lightning, prescribed burning, fire-frequency impacts on vegetation succession.  Our work helps to inform discussions on the most appropriate long-term strategies to mitigate fire-risks to people, places and ecosystems across the landscape.

Tom also actively pursues cross-disciplinary research, using risk assessment as a framework to integrate climate information into other decision making systems. He is an author of the 2016 Tasmania State Natural Disaster Risk Assessment and the lead author of Projecting Volunteer Resource Requirements Under Extreme Climate Futures Technical Report.