Insurance Council of Australia


2010 Resilience Award Announced

 

Insurance Council announces prize winner for a more resilient Australia

 

The Board of the Insurance Council of Australia today announced the winner of the 2010 Resilience Award.

 

The winner, Professor Stephen Robson, won the award for his emergency alert warning system known as YellowBird.

 

As the recipient of the 2010 Resilience Award, the ICA has awarded Professor Robson with a $50,000 cash prize.

 

The aim of the award is to increase community resilience to extreme weather events.

 

Extreme weather in Australia accounts for 19 of the 20 largest catastrophe events to take place in the last 40 years. While little can be done to stop extreme weather, the level of damage sustained by a community can be mitigated by a community being more resilient.

 

How quickly a community recovers from a disaster can also be managed. This is why raising awareness about community resilience is so important and is highlighted in the ICA’s Resilience Policy.

 

The six key ingredients of resilience as defined in the ICA Resilience Policy are:

 

  1. Community understanding of weather related risks
  2. Risk appropriate land use planning and zoning
  3. Risk appropriate mitigation measures
  4. Risk appropriate property protection standards
  5. Financial risk mitigation in the community
  6. Community emergency and recovery planning

 

[Link to Improving Community Resilience to Extreme Weather Events]

 

The ICA believes YellowBird makes a significant contribution to community resilience.

 

YellowBird is a simple modification to standard AM/FM radio circuitry during an emergency that allows a tone, which is broadcast in routine radio transmissions, to automatically switch on the radio to receive emergency warnings.

 

For a full demonstration of YellowBird go to the following link.

 

Yellowbird - Windows Media File

 

Entries this year were of such a high standard that the ICA announced two second place winners for their outstanding contributions to improving community resilience.

 

The Australian Security Research Centre (ASRC) won recognition for its proposal to create an online self assessment tool for property owners to determine a ‘Durability’ rating for their property.

 

Property owners would be required to identify their property on Google maps and to enter various criteria about the properties construction and use. That information is then combined with database overlays of fire risk, flood risk, security risk etc, based upon the location of the property.

 

The results give the property owner a clear indication of the relative risks faced by the property and the different factors that may improve the properties durability to the risks. Knowledge of these risks would encourage property owners to investigate risk mitigation measures. http://www.securityresearch.org.au

 

The other second place winner is the Torrens Resilience Institute which proposed the creation of a self assessment tool for organisations to create a balanced scorecard of resilience attributes.

 

Identification of weaknesses leads to risk mitigation work by the organisation to focus on vulnerable areas of resilience capability. http://www.torrensresilience.org

 

The ICA would like to thank all those who made a submission to the award.