Insights from our resilient buildings project
Over the past year, we’ve been working alongside the New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering, with funding from the Earthquake Commission, to understand societal expectations for the seismic performance of buildings.Â
In this series of posts, we explore some of our key findings in more depth to give some insight into what New Zealanders think about the performance of buildings in the event of an earthquake and the changes and decisions the country needs to make regarding our seismic engineering and building practices and the current regulatory regime.
How important is seismic risk relative to all other aspects of the built environment?
Sesimic resilience is competing against a range of other demands in our built environment.
In our EQC-funded NZSEE Resilient Buildings Project we explored the importance of seismic resilience relative to other building performance objectives. We wanted to discover the synergies and opportunities for co-benefits.
Life safety stood out as the most important objective. Beyond that, there was a cluster of important drivers: user wellbeing, functionality, longevity, and sustainability. These drivers are highly connected and present significant opportunities for co-benefits: where design approaches can achieve multiple objectives.
Understanding and articulating objectives is an essential foundation to any strategy or policy. If you need support understanding your priorities and translating them into a resilience strategy, get in touch if you want to explore how to go about understanding your community’s risk tolerance.
