The Whole of Home Resilience was a 14-month pilot delivered by the Castlemaine Institute in partnership with the Resilient Building Council, with support from the Victorian Government’s Residential Efficiency Scorecard program, Mount Alexander Shire Council, and the National Partnership Agreement for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The project is now complete, and the full findings have been published in our 2025 report: Learnings from the Whole of Home Resilience Pilot for Households in Mount Alexander Shire.

From 2024–25 the Resilient Building Council trained and accredited five local assessors to deliver a new combined multi-hazard resilience and home energy performance assessment, the first of its kind in regional Australia. Together, these assessors completed 140 Whole-of-Home assessments across the Shire, providing residents with personalised guidance on vulnerability of their home to bushfire, storm and flood; energy efficiency and thermal comfort; practical retrofit options tailored to their house type, condition and risk profile and likely costs, benefits and priority sequencing of upgrades.

Assessments revealed widespread bushfire and storm vulnerability, poor thermal comfort in heat, and significant variation between individual homes. Tailored, on-site advice enabled effective retrofit planning, with combined energy and resilience improvements promising substantial household benefits including savings in energy costs, insurance premiums, a positive benefit-cost ratio for resilience retrofits and reduced likelihood of future damage and loss.

The final report recommends a staged regional rollout of Whole-of-Home assessments across central Victoria, supported by further assessor training, improved hazard data accessibility, and integrated community support programs.