The Bushfire Resilience Rating App – Accelerating Resilience To Climate Change

Safe and secure housing is a fundamental human right, yet climate change threatens this necessity for millions. Adaptation is crucial, but barriers remain: limited understanding of risks, inadequate data and tools, fragmented support, and funding gaps. The Resilience Building Council was created to overcome these barriers by empowering collective action across the value chain, giving communities the tools and support to adapt. Our key design challenge was: ”How might we empower property owners and communities to assess, understand, and proactively mitigate risks through accessible, actionable, and evidence-based resilience strategies?”

As RBC was a start-up entering a new market space, the team applied a venture design and product discovery approach. The approach emphasises building hypotheses, testing them and iterating until the initial hypotheses have been validated. Our approach leveraged industry experts and over 1,000 community members with lived bushfire experience. Guiding principles of motivation, accuracy, and engagement underpinned the design process. Motivation addressed simplification of technical aspects, combating survey fatigue with gamification. Accuracy was addressed with simple imagery combined with clear question sets, refined through frequent testing. Engagement focused on personalised information and trust-building, education sequences and actionable recommendations.

The app is free to homeowners, driving uptake of typically paid assessments. Within a month, over 4000 users adopted it, with a 75% assessment compilation rate. Tailored, professional-grade recommendations drive targeted investment with immediate impact, resulting in a 67% reduction in home ignition risk during bushfires. This enhances insurability, reduces recovery costs that result with climate change as well as helping communities feel safe and secure in their home. In the next phase, the app will cover more hazards and focus on energy efficiency, which combined will help communities become more resilient and sustainable in the face of climate change.

Bushfire Resilience Rating: The Resilience Rating considers both building attributes and environmental risk levels, ensuring a comprehensive assessment. It’s designed to be easily understood, enhancing credibility and comprehension of the score. It introduces a new market mechanism and globally recognised standard for natural disaster resilience: a science-based rating system that allows banks, insurers and governments to assess and record resilience, rewarding improved resilience with lower premiums and mortgages. Certified Recommendations Report: In under 20 minutes, a tailored, digital report of actionable insights is delivered to plan the next steps of the resilience journey. Alongside a guide to provide additional resources specific to the recommendation, the report can be used by homeowners without expert assistance whilst producing the quality of assessments that professionals could provide. As no two homes are the same, these insights demonstrate how the combination of structural and environmental risks factors impact a home, and benefit whole communities. As more homes are upgraded, the risk of house-to-house fire decreases. This is an important driver and mitigation point to avoid the loss of whole townships. These features reduce decision fatigue and encourage incremental improvement, whilst addressing the financial effort required to make changes to the home.