Rebuilding sustainable homes after bushfires

Thank you for supporting Renew's Green Rebuild Toolkit and our important work to help communities build sustainably and with bushfire resilience, given the increasing frequency of major bushfire events in Australia.

The Black Summer bushfires in Australia destroyed 5,900 buildings and homes in the summer of 2019-2020. 2.9 million people had their homes damaged, threatened or were temporarily displaced. In response to this devastation, we developed the Green Rebuild Toolkit as a set of resources to help people rebuild their homes and increase bushfire resilience.

This spring and summer Australia has already seen many major fire events, but heatwaves and risk of bushfires are expected to worsen over the next few years, with high rainfall over the past three years having increased vegetation, which poses a major fire risk when dried out.  

With your generous funding we were able to expand the Toolkit to include 12 amazing profiles of Australia's most fire resilient homes. In 2023 Nigel Bell from ECODesign Architects helped us assess over 28 submitted designs to find the best examples we could. You can read more about the research and dive into the case studies here.

in Nov 2023 we also ran a series of free online events with the designers that showcased the case studies and discussed different approaches. The timing of these webinars was imporant as we lead into a hot summer with high fire risk. You can view the webinars here.

This free series was very popular and made possible by you, with over 1000 bookings for the Budget Friendly Bushfire Resilient Design webinar, and around 300 people attending each event live. Just one month after the event series, with no significant promotion as yet, there are already close to 100 views on each event recording, with one of the events having over 350 views. This shows a great need for such resources, which you have helped provide.

We plan to better promote the event recordings and case studies over the coming months, for those who missed out on the live events.

We are now seeking funding for a third phase of this project, where we hope to expand into Flood Resilient resources. For now, any donations will go towards our ability to keep the Green Rebuild Toolkit updated and to promote these resources further within bushfire affected communities and local governments.

Many thanks from the Renew Team.