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
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
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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.