Climate change is a challenge facing nations worldwide. The Fifth IPCC Assessment Report (2007) indicated that climate change is inevitable and that nations need to quickly adapt to mitigate its effects on the risks associated with increased tropical cyclone intensity, storm surge inundation, floods and exacerbated spread of disease. Nationally consistent exposure information is required to understand the risks associated with climate change and thereby support decision making on adaptation options. Decision makers can draw on this evidence-base to develop more rational, representative and objective strategies for addressing emerging challenges. Exposure information requires the translation of fundamental data into information and knowledge before it can be put to use for policy, planning and implementation. Communities, businesses, essential services and infrastructure are all exposed to these increased natural hazards. A thorough understanding of exposed infrastructure, building stock and population under current and future climate projections is fundamental to the process of future capacity building. The National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) provides a broad range of information on the exposure profile of any given area at various administrative and disaster sensitive geographic resolutions with Australia-wide coverage. The information is collected, collated and maintained at building level that can subsequently be aggregated geographically. The information recorded in NEXIS covers a wide range of building attributes such as building type, construction type and year built together with information on population demographics and metrics on business activity such as business type, turnover, employee numbers and customer capacity.

This framework is a reference for individuals and agencies involved in bushfire risk assessment in Australia who seek to improve information on bushfire risk from quantitative methods compared to qualitative methods. It is aimed at bushfire researchers and risk managers in fire, planning and related agencies. Computational bushfire risk assessment is in an early stage of development in Australia. It is an opportune time to establish a framework sufficiently broad that it will accommodate pre-existing and new methods to assess bushfire risk while encouraging innovation. Current methods for assessing bushfire risk in Australia use different terminologies and approaches, and application of an overarching framework improves the potential to compare methods and confidence in comparing results between studies.

A comprehensive earthquake impact assessment requires an exposure database with attributes that describe the distribution and vulnerability of buildings in the region of interest. The compilation of such a detailed database will require years to develop for a moderate-sized city, let alone on a national scale. To hasten this database development in the Philippines, a strategy has been employed to involve as many stakeholders/organizations as possible and equip them with a standardized tool for data collection and management. The best organizations to tap are the local government units (LGUs) since they have better knowledge of their respective area of responsibilities and have a greater interest in the use of the database. Such a tool is being developed by PHIVOLCS-DOST and Geoscience Australia. Since there are about 1,495 towns and cities in the country with varying financial capacities, this tool should involve the use of affordable hardware and software. It should work on ordinary hardware, such as an ordinary light laptop or a netbook that can easily be acquired by these LGUs. The hardware can be connected to a GPS and a digital camera to simultaneously capture images of structures and their location. The system uses an open source database system for encoding the building attributes and parameters. A user-friendly GUI with a simplified drop-down menu, containing building classification schema, developed in consultation with local engineers, is utilised in this system. The resulting national database is integrated by PHIVOLCS-DOST and forms part of the Rapid Earthquake Damage Assessment System (REDAS), a hazard simulation tool that is also made available freely to partner local government units.

CSIRO climate change projections based on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report indicate that Tasmania is one of the areas within the Australian region that will experience an increased magnitude of severe winds. This study utilises the Climate Futures for Tasmania (CERF project) fine scale climate projections which provide spatial detail of the increasing wind hazard derived through dynamic-downscaling utilizing a regional climate model forcing by 5 GCM's and two climate change scenarios (detailed by Sanabria and Cechet; this conference). These wind hazard estimates are used to determine the impact of the wind hazard on residential infrastructure in the Tasmanian region. Two regions of Tasmania were assessed, one in the north and one in the south. The risk assessment involves an understanding of exposure and wind vulnerability. Built environment exposure information was provided by the National EXposure Information System (NEXIS) developed by Geoscience Australia. Wind vulnerability relationships (relating gust wind speed to damage) were developed by Geoscience Australia through a series of expert workshops and the analysis of wind damage data. Return periods of exceedence loss levels were evaluated at buildings level across each region. These were subsequently used to evaluate annualised losses, which represent the average annual cost to the region of exposure to the wind hazard if viewed through a very wide window in time. Expressing the annualised loss as a percentage of the total reconstruction value gives a measure of the intensity of the risk to the studied community that is not as evident from simple dollar values. Risk projections for the Tasmanian region will be presented and the relationship between wind hazard and risk explored. These outputs will be crucial to informing climate change adaptation options regarding severe winds which should be of significant concern to planning, construction, emergency services and the community as a whole.

Australian building codes through the Australia/New Zealand Wind Actions Standard as well as the wind engineering community in general rely to a significant extent on the peak wind gust speed observations collected over more than 60 years by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The current wind loading code and the performance of our infrastructure (residential, commercial, industrial and critical infrastructure) is based primarily on the Dines anemometer interpretation of the peak gust wind speed. In the early 1990's BoM commenced a program to replace the aging pressure tube Dynes anemometer with the Synchrotac and Almos cup anemometers. As of October 2008 only six Dynes anemometers remain in operation.

FIRE NOTE 4 page article for the BCRC/AFAC information series.

Australia has a three-tiered hierarchal model of government. A single Federal government, eight State/Territory governments and approximately seven hundred municipal councils make up the three tiers. Each of these tiers, and the separate jurisdictions within the tiers, can have their own standards and arrangements for managing information useful for Emergency Management (EM). Other information resources are held by private organisations. The business drivers for a co-ordinated national approach to `data collection, research and analysis?? was identified by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) review and documented in their report `Natural Disasters in Australia ? Reforming mitigation, relief, and recovery arrangements? in 2001 (released in August 2002). Representatives of all tiers of governments were signatories to this report. Later in 2001 the events in New York on September 11 reinforced the business drivers for access to data that transcends jurisdictional boundaries, as did the 2003 bushfires in Canberra. Against this backdrop there are several projects that are addressing the infrastructure and data requirements at the state/territory level. The `LIST? in Tasmania. `VicMap? in Victoria, the `EICU? project in NSW, the `SIS? project in Queensland, the `SLIP? project in Western Australia and the ESA CAD system in the ACT are examples of spatial information Infrastructure initiatives that partially support EM at the jurisdictional level. At the national level the Australian & New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) proposed a national Distributed Spatial Data Library in 2003. Previous attempts to create centralised repositories have failed but maturing web services and the ability to produce hard-copy maps on-demand have moved this concept to a practical reality. Underpinning the distributed library is the development of a community `All Hazards? Data Taxonomy/Model for the EM community. The majority of the state jurisdictions provided input to the taxonomy, while additional expertises in the modelling and socio-economic domains were provided by Geoscience Australia (GA). The data identified by the taxonomy is sourced from varied and complex sources and formatted into a simplified, coherent form suitable for Emergency Management. The benefits of sharing data through a standardised framework are being progressively demonstrated to organisations through the ability to provide early warning of threats to their assets and services, while ensuring they maintain control of their data. There are still many hurdles to overcome before an infrastructure to support a Distributed Spatial Data Library can be realised. These hurdles can be broadly categorised as technological and cultural. The technological hurdles are no longer a significant barrier as bandwidth steadily increases, and major GIS systems support web service based data integration. It is arguably the cultural hurdles that are the most difficult. The process of consultation and review used in creating the `All Hazards? taxonomy has created a realisation among the jurisdictions of the benefits of closer ties and co-operation in data sharing and delivery arrangements. There is still some distance to travel but the implementation of an Australian Distributed Spatial Data Library for Emergency Management is moving closer to reality.

When considering structural design with regard to wind loading, the Australian building code through the Australia/New Zealand Wind Actions Standard (AS/NZS 1170.2, 2002) as well as the wind engineering community in general, relies to a significant extent on the peak wind gust speed observations collected over more than 60 years by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The wind-loading performance of our infrastructure (resilience) is based primarily on the Dines anemometer interpretation of the peak gust wind speed. In the early 1990's BoM commenced a program to replace the aging pressure tube Dines anemometer with the Synchrotac and Almos cup anemometers. This paper presents the results of a reanalysis of the current BoM peak wind gust database for the non-cyclonic region (Region A) of AS/NZS 1170.2 (2002). We compares estimates of the 500-year RP peak wind gust hazard magnitude derived of varying observing record lengths obtained from 31 "Region A" BoM sites. Region A was considered for this initial study as record length would contain a significant number of extreme events (synoptic or thunderstorm) over decadal time scales (i.e. extremes not dominated by one or two tropical cyclone events). To isolate the issue of anemometer replacement, only wind stations located at airports (consistent exposure) and with more than 30 years of record were considered. The methodology was formulated to explore the consistency of peak wind gust measurements due to issues surrounding equipment upgrading. Comparison of results indicated that the recent period (1990-2006) appears to have a reduction in significant events (13 of 31 sites have a mean 500 year RP below the 95% confidence limit for the 500 year RP estimate using the total record). Future plans are to calibrate some existing Dines instruments in-situ in an effort to provide sufficient information to fully specify the dynamic response over the range of operating conditions

We describe a new framework for quantitative bushfire risk assessment that has been produced in the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre's (Bushfire CRC) research program. The framework is aimed at assisting state of the art fire research in Australia and fire risk managers in state and territory governments. There is a need for improved bushfire risk information to address the recommendations on bushfire risk management from the inquiries held after disastrous fires in the past decade. Quantitative techniques will improve this risk information however quantitative bushfire risk assessment is in its infancy in Australia. We use the example of calculating house damage and loss to describe the elements of the framework. The framework builds upon the well-defined processes in the Australian Risk Management standard (AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009) and the National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines.

We report on an assessment of severe wind hazard across the Australian continent, and severe wind risk to residential houses (quantified in terms of annualised loss). A computational framework has been developed to quantify both the wind hazard and risk due to severe winds, based on innovative modelling techniques and application of the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS). A combination of tropical cyclone, synoptic and thunderstorm wind hazard estimates is used to provide a revised estimate of the severe wind hazard across Australia. The hazard modelling utilises both 'current-climate information and also simulations forced by IPCC SRES climate change scenarios, which have been employed to determine how the wind hazard will be influenced by climate change. We have also undertaken a national assessment of localised wind speed modifiers including topography, terrain and the built environment (shielding). It is important to account for these effects in assessment of risk as it is the local wind speed that causes damage to structures. The effects of the wind speed modifiers are incorporated through a statistical modification of the regional wind speed. The results from this current climate hazard assessment are compared with the hazard based on the existing understanding as specified in the Australian/New Zealand Wind Loading Standard (AS/NZS 1170.2, 2002). Our analysis has identified regions where the design wind speed depicted in AS/NZS 1170.2 is significantly lower than 'new' hazard analysis. These are regions requiring more immediate attention regarding the development of adaptation options including consideration by the wind loading standards committee for detailed study in the context of the minimum design standards in the current building code regulations.