1 2016 Floodplain Management Association National Conference A Planning Decision Support Tool for Assessment and 3D Visualisation of Flood Risk to Buildings Sam AMIREBRAHIMI, Abbas RAJABIFARD, Priyan MENDIS, Tuan NGO, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC Summary Following the 2010-11 floods in Queensland and Victoria, the statutory planning acts as well as the Australian Building Code were modified to put a special emphasis on increasing the flood resistance of new developments in flood-prone areas and ensuring their flood resilience. In the current practice, depending on the local government planning workflows, each development in flood overlay zones is either assessed by the council itself or referred to respective referral authorities. The "Freeboard" - the maximum allowable water depth above habitable floor-level - is the most acceptable and commonly employed tool for evaluating the proposals in Australia. It however, does not take into account the flood resilience of design and the materials of the building. On the other hand, the current risk assessment tools are either limited for estimation of buildings flood risks or do not account for unique responses of buildings against flood actions. The shortcomings of the current methods may hinder evidence- based decisions by a range of decision makers for effective design of the buildings or employing of mitigation measure for ensuring their flood resilience. This paper provides an overview of a designed framework and a decision support tool for a detailed assessment of flood risks to proposed buildings. This tool, in support of the current planning needs, allows for the identification of type and the monetary cost of potential flood damages at building's individual component level. In addition, it generates a visualisation of damages that can be queried in an interactive 3D environment. The evaluation of this framework using a real case study showed that it can facilitate decision making for a range of technical and non-technical decision makers for a more resilient and sustainable building design in the planning and development process. Introduction Floods are the costliest and most frequent natural disasters in Australia and around the world (Jha, Bloch, & Lamond, 2012). The lessons learnt from the recent floods have underlined the limitations of management of such hazards via sole focus on containment strategies using flood walls, levees, or other structural measures (Birkmann et al., 2013; Merz, Kreibich, Schwarz, & Thieken, 2010). Accordingly, modern flood management techniques adopt Flood Risk Management (FRM) as their central framework. Via focusing on both components of flood risk (i.e. hazard and the vulnerability of elements at risk), FRM intends to identify and, via adopting suitable measures, mitigate the risks at different levels of the community. In the management of flood risks, particularly in the urban context, a special emphasis is made on buildings. This is due to the significance of buildings to the economy as well as their large share in the overall flood damage bill of the affected economy (Dewals, Giron, Ernst, Hecq, & Pirotton, 2008; Messner et al., 2007). In addition, empirical