Published works

This report forms part of the output from Project A9 entitled “Cost-Effective Mitigation Strategy Development for Building Related Earthquake Risk” within the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

Earthquakes have the potential to cause widespread damage to Australian communities and the economic activity that occurs within them. Recent earthquake events have illustrated this, including the Newcastle Earthquake (1989) and the Kalgoorlie Earthquake (2010). This potential is largely due to the fact that much of the Australian building stock has not been designed nor constructed with adequate consideration of earthquake hazard. 

Mitigation intervention is needed to reduce this risk but an evidence base is lacking to inform investment. In particular, there is a need for economic measures of the benefits of retrofit as an offset to the sometimes large costs
of upgrading structures for earthquake. This need exists in many other countries.

As part of this research an extensive literature review has been published to inform the best approach for assessing the costs of business interruption and the losses associated with injury and death. Frameworks have also been developed for a range of Australian decision makers. Decision makers include building owners, owners of both business premises and the business within, local government, state government and national government. The scale of decision making metrics range from individual building level up to business precinct level exposures and the interdependence of building performance within them. The information and models required as inputs into the framework have been identified along with how these will be met, either with outputs from this CRC project, or from other sources.

This report builds on the previous work and provides the experimental estimates for different components of economic loss that might occur in the event of an earthquake scenario. These are specifically business income loss, rental income loss and health care expenditure. The report considers these in the context of the future Greater Melbourne region (excluding Mornington Peninsula) as a case study. 

Current research on the economic loss modelling is on track. Future work will estimate the actual business interruption loss values for assessing precinct level economic activity disruption.