Kate Cotter, CEO, Resilient Building Council

Kate Cotter managed a vineyard in regional Victoria and saw firsthand the devastating impact of bushfire on friends who lost their homes, their businesses and the futures they had worked towards. Kate’s response was to bring experts together to help people through the complexity of re-building after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. She realised that co-ordinating expertise to help people before the disaster could prevent the avoidable suffering she witnessed.

Kate established the Bushfire Building Council of Australia in 2014 to communicate the science of resilient, sustainable buildings with a broader audience. She used her expertise and strong network of disaster resilience and sustainability experts to develop relationships and build collaboration across industry, government and NGOs to create the Resilient Building Council in 2022. Kate leads the development of innovative systems that break down systemic barriers to enable resilience knowledge, communication and investment, so that climate adaptation of the built environment can be achieved in Australia and globally.