Towards effective mitigation strategies for severe wind events
This paper discusses community engagement in wind risk mitigation and reviews literature and existing mitigation programs as background for a smartphone mitigation tool being developed in Queensland, Australia, and Florida, United States of America (USA). Engineering solutions exist to prevent failures however, post-event observations highlight their lack of implementation. It follows that the current level of community engagement in mitigation activities in cyclone-prone regions of Australia must be improved if losses are to be reduced.
The paper concludes the following (p. 6):
- In developing new ways for Australians to identify and assess risk and take meaningful mitigation actions, the experience of previous efforts from the USA should be leveraged.
- Vulnerability rating systems can be a valuable tool to facilitate the interaction between engineering-based risk assessment and risk-reflective pricing in the insurance industry.
- Premium reductions for household upgrades should be used in tandem with loan assistance or government-supported grant programs to help realise more costly upgrades that otherwise would not be financially viable.
- Such programs can stimulate growth in construction and manufacturing industries as new, more cost-effective retrofit products are developed.
- In the longer term, risk-reflective pricing in real estate markets can also be used to support mitigation.
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, Volume 31, Number 3, Pages 33-39, July 2016. This document is published under a licence of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical 4.0 International licence.