The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) is creating a resilience rating tool to enable homeowners to assess the resilience of their property in the face of extreme weather events.

ICA GM Risk & Disaster GM Karl Sullivan told the General Insurance Exchange conference in Sydney last week that while the tool will take three years to build, it will enable the insurance industry to be at the forefront of changes to building standards.

He says ICA was prompted to act because the Federal Government is likely to take a “long time to get moving on [amending] land-use planning and building codes”, which are two of the areas highlighted by last year’s natural catastrophes which remain unaddressed.

“It could be possibly another decade before we see material change there,” Mr Sullivan said.

The tool will enable homeowners to input the various parameters of their property and identify key vulnerabilities and key strengths.

It will also generate a resilience score out of five for each property, with a higher score representing better durability, much like an energy efficiency rating.

Mr Sullivan says that people will be able to use the tool to assess the durability of a house before buying. At the same time “it puts the industry in the driving seat of saying what is durable and what is not and pushes the market in the right direction”.

“We’re trying to build almost an economy around the resilience of a property that can be used to foster better design, better land-use planning and better selection of building materials.”

But Mr Sullivan says gathering the information to assess the durability of various materials is “incredibly complex”.

He says not enough is known about many construction materials, such as how quickly different materials burn, how they function under sustained inundation and what their thermal properties are.

Rather than funding the research into the performance of various building materials, Mr Sullivan says ICA is creating a “Wikipedia-style” index, which will enable the manufacturers to test materials and supply their own information. This will be accepted if the testing meets ICA standards.