Published works

The study of historical occurrences of natural disasters only provides a very limited view of the full range of risk Australia is exposed to. Catastrophe models have been designed as a tool to extrapolate beyond past experience and as such can help risk practitioners prepare for the types of events yet to be seen.

In this project we propose to apply the same techniques at the core of catastrophe models to design realistic disaster scenarios. The focus is not only on the hazard magnitude to be expected from the rare extreme events simulated but also on the likely impact in terms of building damage, infrastructure disruption and injuries / loss of human lives. To provide a global picture of natural disaster risk in Australia a range of perils and locations are selected through the 3 years of the project. To date the scenarios delivered cover Tropical Cyclones, Earthquake and Heatwave perils while the regions around Adelaide, Melbourne and Southeast Queensland have been at the center of our analysis. In the last year of the project our focus will shift towards flooding events triggered by Tropical Cyclones in Queensland and East Coast Lows in New South Wales.

It is our hope that emergency services can leverage the type of information generated from such scenarios to assess their capabilities to cope with the response and recovery task. Several examples of utilisation to date are listed in this report along with promising leads for the coming year.