We have applied new modelling and analysis techniques to develop a revised understanding of the regional wind hazard across Australia.0 This modelling has enabled the development of a wind hazard map for the Australian region. Regional wind hazard has been assessed by utilising statistical-parametric models, dynamical downscaling and spatial interpolation techniques allowing the derivation of estimates of wind hazard from three different phenomena - tropical cyclones, thunderstorms and synoptic storms. Across much of the interior of the country, the revised estimates of regional wind speeds are comparable to the regional wind speeds specified in the existing Australian - New Zealand wind loading standard (AS/NZS 1170.2 2010), generally to within 10 percent for the design wind speeds (500-year return period gust wind hazard). The regional wind speeds derived in AS/NZS 1170.2 were determined from analysis of long-term records (observations) of daily maximum gust wind speeds. A preliminary assessment of wind risk for the four case study regions, utilising the new modelled hazard methodology as well as the climate simulations, indicated little change in the hazard during the 21st century and therefore little or no change to the wind risk associated with the current residential building stock. When population projections were utilised to infer increased number of buildings (all built to the present standard), the proportion of legacy buildings within the building population declined resulting in a decline in wind risk.

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.

The influence of federalism, especially in the role of fiscal centralisation, has significantly shaped Australia's state and federal government approaches and management of natural disasters. A review of the political climate around the time Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974 provides a significant insight into how the relationship between the Commonwelath and State Governments shaped the backbone of Australia's emergency management arrangements. This influence is still evident today and provides an ongoing challenge for achieveing long-term mitigation.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) and Geoscience Australia are developing a long-term partnership in order to better understand and reduce the risks associated with earthquake hazards in the Philippines. The current partnership is specifically designed to enhance the damage estimation capabilities of the Rapid Earthquake Damage Assessment System (REDAS) software, developed by PHIVOLCS. We have chosen Iloilo City, Western Visayas, as the pilot community to demonstrate our earthquake risk assessment - QuiveR (Quick Unified Inventory of Vulnerability and Exposure for REDAS) Any natural hazard risk assessment requires an understanding on the nature and vulnerability of the building stock in the region of interest. We have acquired two main datasets; 1) the Philippine National Statistics Office census data; and 2) the Iloilo City Assessors Office Data, each providing unique attributes on the nature of the building stock and socio-economic indicators for the city. Finally, to supplement and validate these data, we conducted building surveys within Iloilo City. Through this project, we have engaged with local structural engineering community which led to the development of a National Building Classification Schema and consensus-based vulnerability curves for key building types in the Philippines. Finally, we discuss how models from this engagement process have been incorporated into REDAS to enable risk calculations for scenario earthquakes near Iloilo City. Finally, we have demonstrated how detailed understanding of the building stock in a local community can assist with natural hazard risk assessments - not just for risk reduction and response activities for future earthquakes, but possibly for a range of natural hazards.

The recent review into natural disasters endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments recommends that Australia work towards the development of a world class national framework for natural disaster management. Currently, there is no nationally consistent tool that provides information about the social aspects (vulnerability, capacity, recovery) of Australian communities to natural hazards. Such information is essential in gaining a holistic picture of risk from natural hazards and would greatly assist decision makers responsible for and administering funding under the recommended natural disaster arrangements endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). The Risk Research Group at Geoscience Australia is developing rigorous risk assessments and tools to assist Federal and State Government decision makers better mitigate the risks from natural hazards. Social research, when combined with a physical model of natural hazards, can contribute to the development of comprehensive risk assessments for use by government decision makers. It can also be used to assist government decision makers gain an insight into the factors shaping long-term community recovery. The COAG Review recognises the need for evidence based risk assessments to be undertaken for Australia communities, as well as recognising the need for a greater understanding of long term recovery within communities. This paper will provide an example of a national framework that draws on social datasets and vulnerability research to ptovide an insight into some of the key factors influencing long-term community recovery. The framework is adapted to address Recommendation 43 of the COAG review, which recognises the need for government to support long-term community recovery in order to develop sustainable communities. The role of social research in developing this recommendation demonstrates that by understanding our governance system and current policy developmnet, natural disaster research can significantly contribute to the Australian Government's management of natural disasters.

The folder contains the tropical cyclone wind hazard simulations undertaken by GA for the Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP). Subfolders contain the input data and results for historical and projected wind hazard for the West Pacific obtained using GA's Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM). The historical hazard was derived from the global best track archive (IBTrACS) and two sets of hazard projections were performed. The first set was based on statistical-dynamical downscaled tracks from WindRiskTech for four GCMs (CNRM, ECHAM5, MIROC, MRI) and for two time windows of 20C and 2080-2099 under an A1B SRES emission scenario. The second set was based on tracks from dynamical-downscaling (CCAM) of five GCMs (CSIRO MK3.5, ECHAM5, GFDL CM2.0, GFDL CM2.1, HADCM3) for 1981-2000 and 2080-2099 under an A2 SRES emissions scenario. A doc folder also contains a report and draft paper to provide additional information.

Climate change is expected to increase severe wind hazard in many regions of the Australian continent with consequences for exposed infrastructure and human populations. The objective of this paper is to provide an initial nationally consistent assessment of wind risk under current climate, utilizing the Australian/New Zealand wind loading standard [1] as a measure of the hazard. This work is part of the National Wind Risk Assessment (NWRA), which has been commissioned by the Australian Federal Government (Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) to highlight regions of the Australian continent where there is high wind risk to residential structures under current climate, and where, if hazard increases under climate change, there will be a greater need for adaptation. This assessment is being undertaken by separately considering wind hazard, infrastructure exposure and the wind vulnerability of infrastructure (residential buildings only). The NWRA aims to initially provide a benchmark measure of wind risk nationally (current climate), underpinned by the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) developed by Geoscience Australia and the wind loading standard [1]. The outputs of the NWRA will be crucial to informing climate change adaptation options regarding severe winds which should be of significant concern to decision-makers in planning, construction, emergency services, and the insurance industry, as well as the community as a whole. The methodology developed at Geoscience Australia to analyse the direct impact of severe wind on Australian communities involves the parallel development of the understanding of wind hazard, residential building exposure and the wind vulnerability of residential structures. Here we provide a preliminary indication of the current climate wind risk expressed as annualized loss.

The Bushfire CRC initiated in 2011 the project 'Fire & Impact Risk Evaluation - Decision Support Tool (F.I.R.E.-D.S.T)' involving Geoscience Australia, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and University of Melbourne. The project is the largest of the Bushfire CRC's suite of projects and conducts research into the multiple aspects required for the computer simulation of bushfire impact and risk on the peri-urban and urban interface. This paper will provide an overview of the research directions for the project and our research progress. In particular we will summarise our progress in: - The development of a Bushfire Risk Assessment Framework, - The inclusion of detailed building information to improve exposure, - The inclusion of human factors and wind damage in determining building vulnerability to bushfires, - The new Bureau of Meteorology ACCESS Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system to provide high temporal and spatial resolution meteorology for input into the PHOENIX Rapidfire fire spread simulation model, - The development of very-high resolution local wind modifiers, - The changes made to the PHOENIX fire simulation system, - The development of an bushfire impact/damage subsystem, - The integration of the exposure, vulnerability, fire spread and impact systems to produce a cohesive research tool, and - Initial research on convection column and smoke plume dynamics. The team examined the effectiveness of this research by analysing numerous simulation scenarios. This paper will display the effectiveness of the research progress by providing one example of the comparison between the 2009 Black Saturday

Cyclone Tracy is the only tropical cyclone to have devastated a major Australian population centre. Following the disaster (December 1974), the Australian Government implemented significantly improved building standards aimed at reducing the impact of a similar event in future. Geoscience Australia has developed models of severe wind risk for the Australian continent which utilise impact modelling, where we separately assess hazard, exposure and vulnerability in order to evaluate impact/damage. As often occurs in extreme natural disasters, meteorological instrumentation failed prior to the maximum wind gusts being recorded, so the spatial extent of the peak wind gusts were inferred from models constrained by estimates of the observed maximum peak wind gust. For this study, we utilise the wind vulnerability relationships determined in recent years for similar circa 1974 structures, and our knowledge of the type and specific location of structures at the time, to make the link between hazard and impact/damage. This spatial damage estimation (site specific values) is compared with the observed 1974 post-event survey damage in an effort to validate the model. As a result of Cyclone Tracy and the subsequent evacuation of 75% of the population, much more attention was given to building codes and other social aspects of disaster planning (i.e. tree planting). The likelihood of another severe cyclone impacting Darwin is real and on past experience likely within the next few decades. The study utilises both the exposure and vulnerability for 1974 and present-day residential building inventories, to evaluate the resulting effectiveness of the improved building codes. This provides a comparative impact assessment of the scenario were Cyclone Tracy to occur in the current cyclone season and evaluates the reduced vulnerability of the present building stock (compared to 1974). The study also assesses the effect that improved building standards have had on the Darwin community.

The Australian National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment (NCVA) was commissioned by the Federal Government to assess the risk to coastal communities from climate related hazards. In addition to an understanding of the impact/risk posed by the current climate, the study also examined the change in risk under a range of future climate scenarios. This assessment will provide information for application to policy decisions for, inter alia, land use, building codes, emergency management and insurance applications. Geoscience Australia coordinated the work undertaken to quantify the impact on property and infrastructure. This included the development of SMARTLINE, a nationally-consistent database of coastal morphology for the entire country, which provides critical information on the geology and landforms and their potential susceptibility to instability or degradation due to environmental or climatic factors. In a first-order attempt to assess the climate-change induced hazard to the coastal landscape, SMARTLINE data have been combined with sea-level rise (SLR) projections for 2030 and 2100, and 1 in 100 year current-climate storm surge estimates to determine potential areas of inundation and zones of instability where coastal recession due to SLR is predicted. Additionally, cyclonic wind hazard along Australia's northern coastline has been estimated using Geoscience Australia's Tropical Cyclone Risk Model, utilising synthetic tropical cyclone event sets derived from IPCC AR4 global climate models. The hazard levels have been modified for terrain, topographic and shielding effects to reflect localised variations in wind hazard.