Published works

Rapid urbanisation, climate change and unsustain- able developments are increasing the risk of floods. Flood is a frequent natural hazard that has significant financial con- sequences for Australia. The emergency response system in Australia is very successful and has saved many lives over the years. However, the preparedness for natural disaster im- pacts in terms of loss reduction and damage mitigation has been less successful.

In this paper, a newly derived flood loss function for Australian residential structures (FLFArs ) has been presented and calibrated by using historic data collected from an extreme event in Queensland, Australia, that occurred in 2013. After- wards, the performance of the method developed in this work (contrasted to one Australian model and one model from USA) has been compared with the observed damage data collected from a 2012 flood event in Maranoa, Queensland. Based on this analysis, validation of the selected methodolo- gies has been performed in terms of Australian geographical conditions.

Results obtained from the new empirically based function (FLFArs ) and the other models indicate that it is apparent that the precision of flood damage models is strongly dependent on selected stage damage curves, and flood damage estima- tion without model calibration might result in inaccurate predictions of losses. Therefore, it is very important to be aware of the associated uncertainties in flood risk assessment, es- pecially if models have not been calibrated with real damage data.