The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a major virus outbreak of the 21st century. The Australian government and local authorities introduced some drastic strategies and policies to control the outspread of this virus. The policies related to lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, shut down of educational institute, work from home, and international and interstate travel bans significantly affect the lifestyle of citizens and, thus, influence their activity patterns. The transport system is, thus, severely affected due to the COVID-19 related restrictions. This paper analyses how the transport system is impacted because of the policies adopted by the Australian government for the containment of the COVID-19. Three main components of the transport sector are studied. These are air travel, public transport, and freight transport. Various official sources of data such as the official website of the Australian government, Google mobility trends, Apple Mobility trends, and Moovit were consulted along with recently published research articles on COVID-19 and its impacts. The secondary sources of data include databases, web articles, and interviews that were conducted with the stakeholders of transport sectors in Australia to analyse the relationship between COVID-19 prevention measures and the transport system. The results of this study showed reduced demand for transport with the adoption of COVID-19 prevention measures. Declines in revenues in the air, freight, and public transport sectors of the transport industry are also reported. The survey shows that transport sector in Australia is facing a serious financial downfall as the use of public transport has dropped by 80%, a 31.5% drop in revenues earned by International airlines in Australia has been predicted, and a 9.5% reduction in the freight transport by water is expected. The recovery of the transport sector to the pre-pandemic state is only possible with the relaxation of COVID-19 containment policies and financial support by the government.

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Floods have been a major cause of destruction, instigating fatalities and massive damage to the infrastructure and overall economy of the affected country. Flood-related devastation results in the loss of homes, buildings, and critical infrastructure, leaving no means of communication or travel for the people stuck in such disasters. Thus, it is essential to develop systems that can detect floods in a region to provide timely aid and relief to stranded people, save their livelihoods, homes, and buildings, and protect key city infrastructure. Flood prediction and warning systems have been implemented in developed countries, but the manufacturing cost of such systems is too high for developing countries. Remote sensing, satellite imagery, global positioning system, and geographical information systems are currently used for flood detection to assess the flood-related damages. These techniques use neural networks, machine learning, or deep learning methods. However, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) coupled with convolution neural networks have not been explored in these contexts to instigate a swift disaster management response to minimize damage to infrastructure. Accordingly, this paper uses UAV-based aerial imagery as a flood detection method based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract flood-related features from the images of the disaster zone. This method is effective in assessing the damage to local infrastructures in the disaster zones. The study area is based on a flood-prone region of the Indus River in Pakistan, where both pre-and post-disaster images are collected through UAVs. For the training phase, 2150 image patches are created by resizing and cropping the source images. These patches in the training dataset train the CNN model to detect and extract the regions where a flood-related change has occurred. The model is tested against both pre-and post-disaster images to validate it, which has positive flood detection results with an accuracy of 91%. Disaster management organizations can use this model to assess the damages to critical city infrastructure and other assets worldwide to instigate proper disaster responses and minimize the damages. This can help with the smart governance of the cities where all emergent disasters are addressed promptly.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected global economies due to lockdowns, business closures, and travel and other restrictions. To control the spread of the virus, several countries, including Australia, imposed strict border restrictions and lockdown measures. Accordingly, international borders have been closed, and all incoming international passengers are mandated to a 14-day hotel quarantine. Residents’ movements and businesses have been limited to essential services only. Employees have been directed to work from home while businesses moved to a remote working model. Due to such stringent measures, small and medium businesses such as cafes, restaurants, hotels, childcare centers, and tourism-based institutions incurred heavy losses, pushing a considerable portion of such small businesses to close. The airlines, education, tourism, and hospitality sector were the worst impacted among all. Due to such closures and associated effects of COVID-19, the unemployment rates are assumed to be significantly increased in countries like Australia. However, a study investigating this unemployment and reporting its status does not exist for Australia. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the effects of COVID-19 control measures such as travel restriction and lockdown on Australia’s employment status and labor markets. The data for the local transport network, unemployment rates and impacts on the tourism industry in Australia were extracted from the public data sources to assess the unemployment rates at both national and state-wide levels. Further, we also looked into the rehabilitation measures by the Australian government, such as the Job Keeper and Job Seeker programs in March 2020, that aim to provide support to people who are unable to run their businesses or have lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Overall, we observed that despite the global crisis, the Australian unemployment rate has reduced in the last year.