Australia's risky gamble with extreme weather

360info

Better planning for extreme weather in a changing climate means learning from Australia’s past mistakes and taking a tougher line on managing development.  Professor of Geoscience Jonathan Nott from James Cook University explains why better planning, often to overcome past mistakes, is the key to reducing the cost of extreme weather event

Transcript

00:00We gamble with risk by allowing people to build and locate themselves in in

00:05dangerous locations. We know what the risks are, we know how often these events

00:11will come through such as floods, storm surges, bushfires, landslides. We

00:16understand the risks reasonably well these days but we continue to allow this

00:20to occur. What we say is that okay we will provide immunity to say the one in

00:25100 year event and then we say okay we will try and gain economic benefits from

00:31development in that area and we'll hope that the one in 100 year event doesn't

00:35come along for a long time but it invariably does and people suffer. Their

00:40homes get flooded, their homes get washed away, people are traumatized, some people

00:45lose their lives unfortunately. We have a saying in the business and that is that

00:50all natural disasters are a result of poor planning and the only way to fix

00:56that is to have better planning. Though really it's up to the consent authority.

01:01The consent authority are the people that give permission for these

01:04developments to go ahead. That's usually local government in Australia. We can

01:08build in safe areas, we don't have to continue building in these really really

01:13dangerous locations. That is next to rivers, on floodplains, along coasts where

01:19storm surges are prone or coastal erosion is going to be occurring or

01:24necessarily in areas where bushfires are going to occur. I know people want to

01:28live in those locations but the reality is that this can be very very dangerous.

01:32So we've got to start doing this in my opinion or in some way make our

01:39dwellings resilient to these sorts of natural hazards which makes them more

01:43expensive and difficult to build but but it can be done and also the rest of

01:50the community has to pay for this. Not necessarily for that building but we pay

01:54for it through our insurance premium. Every time new assets are placed in the

01:59path of these hazards, the insurance industry says well look we've got more

02:03potential losses so we have to put up our premiums in order to cover ourselves

02:08because simply because the consent authority is allowing more of these

02:12buildings to occur, more of these developments to occur, local governments

02:16and also state governments through their really ineffective policies. Ineffective

02:21because they're not enforceable, they're not legislation, they're just guidelines

02:24and local governments don't have to follow them. So through those sorts of

02:28policies, developments are continuing to occur and we are paying as a community

02:32as a whole. Even when the disaster hasn't occurred yet, we still continue to pay

02:36for it through our insurance premiums and that's a big issue at the moment

02:40throughout North Queensland, here where I live and also throughout the rest of

02:44Northern Australia.

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