A series of half-day seminars addressing the significance of the issue of property resilience, will be held across Australia and New Zealand in March/April.

The seminars will be lead by Jeremy Mansfield, a corporate volunteer and Head of Development at Green Cross Australia, and supported by presenters from the insurance and building services industries.

“Resilience is about the interaction of people, buildings and infrastructure with their local environment climatic conditions, Jeremy Mansfield explained, “and ‘building for resilience’ is a critical response to all climate scenarios for communities wishing to adapt and thrive as our climate changes.”

“Buildings and infrastructure must have the resilience and flexibility to manage and respond to the impacts of climate change,” said Jeremy Mansfield. “Ignoring property resilience will have a long term detrimental effect on climate change mitigation and community well being.”

According to Mr Mansfield, due to the non-retrospective nature of building regulation, the National Code of Construction (formally Building Code of Australia) is not applicable to existing buildings, which form the majority of the building stock. 

“We need to challenge our current premise that a minimum standard is good enough, because it has worked in the past and is what the ‘market’ desires. The increasing need to cope with adversity in our climate will make redundant those design decisions based on hindsight”, said Jeremy Mansfield.

Green Cross Australia CEO Mara Bun said, “The present debate addresses coping with disasters, not a focus on the future. The most sustainable building is one that can cope with long-term change. This tour aims to catalyse dialogue and action to advance Australia’s property sector resilience.”

The seminar program aims to open engaged discussion on measures that can be taken to gain meaningful levels of resilience in existing and new building stock and infrastructure. The seminars will consider key issues such as:

  • Location & access of key building services
  • Adequacy of redundancy and future availability and reliability of infrastructure
  • Insurers’ attitudes to risk, building resilience and future claims
  • Issues uncovered in diligence surveys of buildings that lead to building failure
  • Risk associated with not informing stakeholders of known building resilience weaknesses.

An outcome of the seminar series will be to present a call for action, to bring together key stakeholders from the major institutions and governing bodies to form a collaborative action forum.

The seminar series has been organised by the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), in partnership with Green Cross Australia. It is also being supported by a number of professional and peak body organisations.