Every year, floods impact many Australian communities, often due to inappropriate urban development in flood-prone areas. This creates challenges for emergency management, disrupts lives, and incurs significant costs for government repairs and community recovery.
This project will calibrate damage estimates for a range of impacts that are not well understood, including agriculture, roads, commercial/industrial, environmental services and manufactured homes/caravan parks. The 2022 floods across Australia provide an opportunity for assessing these issues across a range of contexts and flood scales.
The project will be conducted in three stages:
- Stage 1: review of existing research and practice, and identification of gaps and challenges.
- Stage 2: baseline research of recent Australian floods to fill the identified gaps.
- Stage 3: draft guidance for practitioners.
The main outcome will be a robust evidence base to update damage and loss estimation techniques for inclusion in economic assessment, allowing the full cost of impacts to be better understood and thereby informing resilience policy and programs at all levels of government. It could also be of use to the community and private sector, such as insurers. This will better inform the economic assessment and the prioritisation of funding for the required risk reduction strategies.
This project will also update flood damage models to better represent the contemporary cost of damages to agriculture, road and rail infrastructure, commercial/industrial businesses, environmental impact (including clean up) and manufactured homes/caravan parks.
