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Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB)

The new ABCB Climate Map is now available

We have worked with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources Data Strategy Team and the Digital Atlas of Australia team at Geoscience Australia to create a new and improved interactive climate map.

The new map has been developed to support your compliance with the NCC by empowering you to make informed decisions with greater ease and confidence. 

• Existing NCC climate zones
• Local Government Area (LGA) boundaries
• Relative humidity
• Alpine area classifications

Key features of the map include:

• Customisable base maps – choose from multiple base maps to suit your specific project needs.
• Advanced search capabilities – search by address, suburb, or postcode to identify the NCC climate zone, even in newly developed areas, using the most recent base maps and LGAs.
• Create reports – generate and share reports containing all necessary information to support planning, approvals, and stakeholder engagement.
• Filters – find locations by climate-related criteria.
• Interactive tools – includes drawing tools, measurement features, swipe comparisons and many more.

CEO Update with Judith Blake

It’s been a productive month at the ABCB, with progress across several important initiatives.

We’ve wrapped up the consultation on the National Voluntary Certification Scheme for Manufacturers of Modern Methods of Construction, receiving strong engagement from stakeholders. Our team also attended the Modern Methods of Construction Showcase in Sydney, gaining valuable insights into innovative housing solutions.

In line with our modernisation efforts, we’ve launched a new online contact form to make it easier for you to reach us. From 1 October, our 1800 number will be retired, and all enquiries will be managed through the website.

We’re also reviewing the CodeMark Certification Scheme to ensure it continues to meet industry and regulatory needs.

Thank you for your ongoing support and involvement. Read more in this month’s CEO update

Our enquiry service is going digital!

As part of the ABCB’s modernisation strategy, we are shifting to a fully online enquiry service. As a part of this change, our 1800 contact number will be closed from 1 October 2025.
Enquiries can now be submitted on our new online contact form. This has been designed to improve the way we respond to your questions by providing more consistent responses and prioriting enquiries based on complexity and urgency.
Visit our help and support page to learn more.

Lessons from the Big Dig megaproject

The multibillion-dollar project’s enormous ambition was tainted when construction turned deadly.

Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel Project, more commonly known as the Big Dig, was one of the largest and most technically challenging highway projects in United States history.

Cutting through the heart of the Massachusetts capital, the massive urban infrastructure project commenced in 1991. It involved moving the city’s six-lane elevated Central Artery (Interstate 93) underground to alleviate traffic congestion, reconnect downtown Boston to the waterfront and improve access to Boston Logan International Airport.

Battling an age-old foe

Corrosion remains one of the biggest threats to Australia’s energy infrastructure.

Even as they work at the cutting edge of energy production, engineers are finding themselves battling an age-old foe: the inexorable force of corrosion.

Beyond death and taxes, there are few certainties in life. For engineers, corrosion is a close-run third. Throughout humanity’s history of metalworking, the destructive creep of corrosion has trailed like a spectre.

And as engineers seek new ways to adapt our infrastructure to the world’s demands for a future of cleaner, greener and more efficient energy sources, corrosion continues to eat away at their progress.

Genuinely sustainable energy

“Traditionally, the energy sector has been at the heart of corrosion engineering,” wrote Mike Yongjun Tan, Professor of Applied Electrochemistry and Corrosion Technologies at Deakin University, considering the topic in a paper he presented to the Corrosion and Prevention 2023 conference in Perth.

“Corrosion, hydrogen embrittlement and various types of materials degradation are expected to pose major challenges to the safety, durability and sustainability of essential infrastructure required for the production, delivery, storage and utilisation of renewable energy.”

From Tan’s perspective, corrosion resistance is needed to make renewable energy generation from such sources as wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, ocean and bioenergy genuinely sustainable – particularly at large scale

Navigating a storm of change

Here are the innovative engineering solutions preparing Australia for future extremes.

In the face of unprecedented climate extremes, entire cities must be built to bounce back, adapt and thrive.

As transmission towers across Queensland and Victoria are knocked down by extreme winds, homes in NSW partially collapse into the sea, and bridges and culverts in remote regions are destroyed by bushfires, severing lifelines to rural communities, serious questions are being asked about resilience in the built environment.

In an age of climate change, engineering is experiencing entirely new challenges that suggest something more than building to code is required.In the Australian engineering space, the standards, roles and expectations are shifting dramatically as a new realisation dawns: mitigation of disasters alone simply won’t cut it.

“It’s possible resilience still means the same thing that it always has, but our context has changed,” said engineer Samantha Peart, Global Head of Sustainability for Hassell.

Why regenerative design is the next big leap for engineering and construction

To move beyond sustainability, how can engineers shift focus from impact reduction to net-positive outcomes?

5 deadly superstructure failures

On the 24th anniversary of the World Trade Center collapse, we revisit five instances where a failing superstructure proved deadly.

By Lachlan Haycock and Caryn Isemann

From skyscrapers to bridges, tunnels to stadiums, when superstructures fail the results can be catastrophic.

Events such as the collapse of Australia’s Tasman Bridge and the caving in of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in the US reveal how design flaws and lapses in maintenance can trigger destruction.

Here are five superstructure failures that proved deadly. Follow the link to read more

Pneumatic dreams: From 19th-century tubes to the Hyperloop

Forget Elon Musk’s Hyperloop – the best applications of pneumatic conveying are arguably the simplest.

Pneumatic tube transport may seem to have gone the way of steam engines, but its unique characteristics mean not only does it live on, but so does the dream of pneumatic transit.

Picture the scene: a wealthy, high-profile inventor makes headlines in cities across the US, promising to revolutionise transit by using air pressure to convey passenger carriages down a tightly fitting tube at unheard-of speeds.

We’re not talking about a 2013-era Elon Musk touting the hyperloop, but the 1870 creation of New York’s first subway – Alfred Ely Beach’s Pneumatic Transit.

Built in secret, the short demonstration line ran beneath Broadway for just 90 m. A single, richly upholstered carriage seated 22 and fit snugly inside the 2.4 m wide tunnel, propelled along at 16 km/h by a 44 t steam-powered Roots blower. When it reached the end of the line, it tripped a switch, reversing the blower’s baffles and pulling the carriage back. In its first year, it carried more than 400,000 people.

While this pneumatic transit line never took off, it came at the beginning of a golden age for pneumatic transport.

Making commercial hydrogen propulsion viable

Could an Australian-made hydrogen-electric aircraft herald emissions-free air travel?

By 2050, commercial aviation could carry 10 billion passengers covering 20 trillion km, resulting in approximately 2350 million t of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Deloitte.

This could represent up to 22 per cent of global emissions, a jump of 450 per cent from the 4 per cent of emissions the industry contributes today – highlighting the urgent need to develop and deploy scalable, low-emissions technologies in one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise. Jet fuel’s unmatched energy density, the long lifespan of aircraft fleets and the complexity of safety-critical systems all contribute to the challenges the industry faces.

Work is underway to address it. According to the International Air Transport Association’s net-zero roadmap, sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) will be responsible for two-thirds of the emissions reductions by 2050. A further 19 per cent is anticipated to come from carbon offsets and capture technologies, while emerging electric and hydrogen propulsion systems are expected to deliver around 13 per cent of the total cuts.

These projections also highlight a critical point: no single solution will decarbonise aviation alone. The sector will need a portfolio of technologies and policies working together. SAFs remain limited in supply and are expensive, while batteries can’t yet deliver the range needed for regional or commercial-scale aviation.

Massive solar arrays visible from space

An Australian solar expert breaks down the latest innovations in materials technology and module deployment.

Five examples of solar farms seen from above, and an Australian solar expert breaks down the latest innovations in materials technology and module deployment.

By Lachlan Haycock

Solar farms on land and water are at once impressive displays of human innovation and intricate examples of energy infrastructure visible from space.

And with the size – by area and by capacity – of these power stations continually increasing, new records are always being set.

Consider the Bhadla Solar Park in India, near the border with Pakistan.

Despite the high temperatures and wind storms in this part of the Thar Desert making for a low population density, the long hours of bright sunshine are perfect for power generation at the 5700-ha, 2245-MW facility.

Learning from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse

More than just the story of a bridge failure, this is a reminder of how quickly the lessons of the past can be forgotten.

The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is more than the story of a bridge failure – it’s a story of how the lessons of the past were forgotten.

The collapse

On 7 November 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, spanning 853 m across Puget Sound in Washington State, began twisting violently in the wind.

Throughout the morning, the magnitude of the undulations grew, with the spectacle attracting sightseers, reporters and a film crew.

One of the reporters, Leonard Coatsworth, drove across the undulating structure, only for his car to stall partway across the bridge. He abandoned the car and, with the bridge heaving so intensely that he couldn’t walk, was forced to crawl off it on all fours.

The twisting continued until the bridge deck tore itself apart, flinging debris and Coatsworth’s car into the waters below.

In simple terms, the cause of the collapse was wind-induced aerodynamic forces, where the wind interacted with the structure to create vibrations that grew over time – like pushing a child’s swing with perfect timing so that it goes higher and higher.

This failure is often cited as the catalyst that set the structural engineering profession on the path to better understand the effects of wind-induced aerodynamic forces on structures. This is true – but it’s also the story of how the profession forgot that it had already solved the problem decades before.

Cutting carbon out of construction

Behind the promise of growth, Australia’s imminent home building boom raises major environmental concerns.

Australia is heading for a home building boom, with a commitment from the Federal Government to deliver 1.2 million new homes by the end of the decade. While this promises to address housing needs, it also poses a significant environmental challenge: the upfront, or embodied carbon emissions generated during the construction process.

This report from the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) and TSA Riley shows that upfront carbon intensity of Australian single-family detached dwellings outweighs their operating emissions by seven times when estimated over a 60-year life span.

Construction materials and activities produce about one tonne of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂-e) per square metre of conditioned floor area (CFA). For an average home, that’s around 185 tCO₂-e in upfront carbon. In comparison, a house built today will emit roughly 24 tCO₂-e over its lifetime, thanks to a decarbonising grid.

“This report has quantified the scale of embodied carbon emissions from Australia’s residential sector for the first time, and it is very significant,” Jorge Chapa, Chief Impact Officer at GBCA, said.