This article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine, September 2024.
TODAY, THE BUSH is still and cool. A faint wind tickles the blue-green tips of the eucalypt leaves, drives wisps of morning mist through the pale trunks of mountain ash and rough brown of Sydney peppermint. Birds twitter and screech, and kangaroos browse on the dewy grass.
Four and a half years ago, this idyllic scene was dead. Fire had swept through, feasting on a desiccated banquet laid for it by years of devastating drought and scorching temperatures. Those fires destroyed lives, lands, cultural heritage, property and infrastructure. The drought brought towns to a water crisis that threatened their very existence. And the record-breaking heat smothered the land, the people, the animals and the plants.
Then came the water; almost unimaginable volumes that poured from the sky, turning rivers into raging torrents, while massive swells took chunks out of the coastline and drained beaches of their sand.
The Insurance Council of Australia declared six catastrophes in the five months between October 2019 and February 2020 and paid out billions in natural disaster claims.
What we’re up against
Humans are incredibly adaptable, aided by a wealth of technologies to keep us cool or warm, dry or watered, sheltered and secure. But in the face of a global climatological disaster of our own making, that adaptability is being stretched to its limit, and even beyond.
“We are a land of extreme events, and they are only intensifying,” says Barbara Norman, Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Canberra. Australians face a multitude of climate-related risks, and very few will be shielded from them.
“When you start to map the risks in the country and where people live and where future urban growth corridors are planned, you start to overlay those things and you can see that a significant percentage of our population is at risk,” Norman says.
Already, around one in 25 homes is at high risk of extreme weather events, making them effectively uninsurable. By 2030, one in 11 homes will be considered medium-risk, which has major implications for their insurability.
Climate change risks are forcing a rethink of urban planning. In 2018, the Planning Institute of Australia released a report titled ‘The Tipping Point’, which called for a national settlement strategy to ensure the liveability of Australian towns and cities in a climate-changed future. It highlighted the many climate change risks that Australians are increasingly exposed to, including heatwaves, bushfires, droughts, floods, cyclones and rising sea levels.
“How do we need to prepare ourselves for our future, whether that be in terms of climate adaptation or in terms of economic change?” asks John Brockhoff, National Policy Manager for the Planning Institute of Australia.
There’s a hierarchy in the urban planning approach to that question. The first and preferable option is to avoid the problem. “Firstly, let’s look at where we can avoid trouble and let’s not locate new growth where we have a choice and where there is a high hazard and a clear risk of that happening and also a potential vulnerability in communities,” says Brockhoff.
The second option is to manage those risks appropriately. “We can put houses up on stilts, we can plan for bushfire protection, but that’s got to be cost-effective,” Brockhoff says. “In some places, it’s more cost-effective than others.”
Sometimes homes and infrastructure are already in the way of the hazard, and no amount of adaptation can protect them. In those situations, climate change is forcing Australians to reckon with the third option: retreat from inhabited places that are fast becoming uninhabitable, either physically because of extremes of heat and drought, or economically because of the cost of repeated disasters and loss of protection from insurance.
But with 85% of the population living in coastal capital cities that will be exposed to sea level rise, let alone those around the country who will be exposed to dangerous heat, drought, fires and floods, it raises the difficult but essential question: in a climate-changed future, where and how will Australians live?
Flooded river in Lismore, NSW, Australia. Credit: davidf/Getty Images.
Avoid
With the mix of gorgeous beaches, pockets of dense bush, outdoor cafes and surfer culture, Sydney’s northern beaches have a glamorous appeal. But hemmed between scrub and sea, there’s not much room to expand. In 2016, the NSW state government put forward a proposal to develop an area to allow for around 3,400 new homes. Ingleside was to be a new suburb including apartments, shops and playing fields.
But there was a problem. The NSW Rural Fire Service assessed the Ingleside area as exposed to ‘potentially extreme existing bushfire risk’. All evacuation routes from the area, bar one, would expose evacuees or fire crews to potentially burning bushland. The one route that wouldn’t run that fiery gauntlet was likely to get choked during a bushfire, with residents from nearby suburbs also trying to flee.
The proposal was amended to drastically reduce the area to be developed, and the number of houses down to 980. But even that wasn’t enough to reassure nearby residents that the development wouldn’t end up a bushfire death trap. Finally in 2022, the proposal was scrapped entirely.
Similar concerns have been raised for other developments including Appin in Sydney’s south-west, Belrose – also on Sydney’s northern beaches – and the Perth Hills development in Stoneville, Western Australia.
“There is a much lower risk appetite in the area of bushfire than there was even five years ago, certainly a lot less than there was before the 2009 fires in Victoria,” says Alan March, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. “It is acknowledging what is the most powerful part of urban planning in respect to bushfire, and that is to avoid humans and structures and things we care about being in proximity to the hazard.”
The same challenge is facing flood-prone areas. The NSW Government recently rezoned parts of the Hawkesbury floodplains in western Sydney – which flooded six times between 2020–2022 – to prevent new homes being built in high-risk areas, saying it “cannot continue to develop and build new residential towns in high-risk areas, and risk putting more people in harm’s way.”
Australia has nearly 60,000km of coastline, and half the population lives within 7km of it. That makes sea-level rise a major concern both for existing and future developments. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast a likely sea-level rise range of 40–80cm by 2100. But it can’t rule out a rise of as much as two metres.
Oceanographer Matthew England, from UNSW Sydney, says one metre doesn’t sound like much, until you factor in tides and storm surges. “It’s the metre of sea level rise plus a storm surge that can add another couple of metres, plus the tidal range is another metre,” England says. “You can get up to six, seven metres above mean sea level with one of these storm surge events, and it’s those events that will be the destructive ones.”
Sea-level rise isn’t evenly distributed around the world, or even around Australia. For example, sea levels are rising faster on Australia’s northern and north-eastern coastline.
The main concern is where this sea level rise impacts human settlements. “Probably far more than which bits of Australia see the worst sea level rise, it’s more which bits are the most exposed,” he says, pointing to Cairns, Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast, where there’s lots of development at low levels of elevation.
Estuaries are where the real concerns lie, says Ian Turner, Professor of Coastal Engineering at UNSW Sydney. They’re attractive places to settle and infrastructure tends to be quite close to sea level. “The combination of slow but accelerating rise in sea level plus storminess means that estuaries are probably our canary in the coal mine, and that’s where we are already seeing impacts of flooding,” Turner says.
Coastal councils around the country are grappling with how to incorporate the threat of sea level rise into planning. For example, South Australia’s Coast Protection Board requires all new coastal development applications to consider a sea level rise of 30cm by 2050, and one metre by 2100, and consider subsidence and erosion. NSW’s Coastal Act includes requirements to “mitigate current and future risks from coastal hazards, taking into account the effects of climate change.”
Norman would like to see mandatory consideration of climate risks in all planning legislation nationally.
“There can be competing interests, like we need more housing, but don’t put it in floodplains or areas of climate risk,” says Norman.
Manage
Saturday 4 January 2020 was always going to be a scorcher. On that particular day, an awful new record was broken. The western Sydney suburb of Penrith briefly achieved the dubious honour of being the hottest place on the planet, clocking in at a tarmac-melting 48.9°C.
It was dangerously close to the limit of human survivability. Heat is the single biggest climate-related killer. Between 2000–2019, extreme heat killed nearly 490,000 people each year globally.
Australia has always had a blasé attitude to heat. “The general feeling amongst many Australians is that, look, it’s a hot country, we’ll get used to it,” says Liz Hannah, a public health researcher at the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute. But Australia loses around $8.7 billion each year in productivity as a result of heatwaves, so evidently we’re not getting used to it.
But Penrith is already home to 217,000 people, extensive infrastructure including a major metropolitan hospital, university and shopping centre. This is not a hazard that can be avoided.
In 2022, the City of Melbourne appointed two Chief Heat Officers, recognising that the city’s residents are statistically at the highest risk of heatwave fatalities in Australia. “We’ve been taking action on heat preparedness for many years,” says Tiffany Crawford, one of Melbourne’s two Chief Heat Officers and Co-director of Climate Change and City Resilience.
Cities are notorious heat sinks that can be 1–3°C warmer than rural areas because of the dark heat-absorbing surfaces such as roads and pavements, the relative lack of trees and green spaces, and
concentration of heat-emitting activities such as transport and industry.
Some areas and populations are more exposed than others. “We also know that our housing towers are particularly vulnerable,” Crawford says. “We’ve heard anecdotal stories of people who can’t open doors or windows at night having to seek shelter in hallways or under trees, or in carparks and down the basement.” Heatwaves disproportionately impact the elderly, people with disabilities, people in financial distress, and those in marginalised communities.
The City of Melbourne has initiatives to reduce the heat island effect, such as its urban forest strategy, which aims to increase canopy cover across the city from 22% to 40% by 2040 and diversify tree species to improve resilience.
In western Sydney, a collective of councils have developed the Turn Down The Heat strategy, which includes an urban heat planning toolkit to help local councils factor heat into their planning decisions. It includes information on everything from cool paving and green cover to more specific house-level changes, such as reducing dark roofs, increasing passive design and use of insulation.
Heat adaptation must also help individuals manage. At Griffith University, heat epidemiologist Zhiwei Xu and colleagues have developed the Ethos Project, an app-based in-home solution to help individuals – particularly older people – monitor and manage their heat exposure. “It’s hard to recommend tailored, effective, accessible and preferable cooling measures to every single one by those population-based heat early warning systems,” Xu says.
The Ethos program monitors the temperature and humidity throughout a home, uses an algorithm to predict the person’s core body temperature, and “recommend cooling measures that are evidence-based, effective, accessible and preferable by older adults based on their personal circumstances,” he says.
Retreat
In 2022, Lismore’s rains smashed all previous records. Two huge floods, just one month apart, turned the bustling and vibrant regional hub into a muddy chaos of debris. Five people died, thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed, and Lismore’s economy took a $400+ million hit. Lismore has known flooding before, but not like this.
A CSIRO report on the Lismore floods stopped short of pointing the finger directly at climate change. However the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated that the frequency and intensity of these heavy rainfall events have already, and are likely to further increase globally, leading to a doubling or even tripling in the frequency of events that previously were expected only every 10 or 50 years.
When disaster strikes, there’s inevitably defiant statements that the community will rebuild: “we’ll be back”, “we’ll build back better”. But in Lismore City Council’s report on the flooding, one phrase stands out: “depopulate high-risk areas and mitigate impacts for remaining residents”.
Retreat is an uneasy concept: an admission of defeat, of overwhelming odds, of a battle too risky to fight.
But in the face of escalating extreme weather events due to anthropogenic climate change, the phrases ‘planned retreat’ and ‘managed retreat’ are being heard everywhere from local council chambers to the halls of federal government.
Managed retreat
The difference between planned and managed retreat is time. “A managed retreat is a retreat that takes place after the fact,” says Tayanah O’Donnell, National Lead Partner for Climate Adaptation, Risk and Resilience at Deloitte Australia. “If you’ve already built houses, or you’ve already made decisions, and you now need to make decisions to retreat from that location, that’s a managed retreat.”
One of Australia’s most famous examples of managed retreat is the small Queensland town of Grantham, in the floodplain of the Lockyer Valley. After the devastating 2011 floods, which claimed 12 lives, the local council implemented an innovative land swap program, where almost the entire town made the decision to relocate to higher ground – a nearby cattle property. Within a year of the flood, 110 homes had been built in the new location, with 50 remaining in the old location.
“It’s a wonderful example of something that was quite localised and fit for purpose for that community”, O’Donnell says. “It was benefited by the fact that it had a really strong local leader in the mayor at the time, who really pushed for that change and had the support and goodwill of the community who were willing to follow him and his leadership in moving and relocating up the hill.”
Planned retreat
Planned retreat is a more long-term strategy that requires more forward thinking. Councils or state governments identify high-risk areas, or areas that will be high-risk in future, and if those risks can’t be mitigated, they look to eventually buy back that land.
“We might say, you’ve got planning rights for 20 years, you can live there for 20 years, but at the end of 20 years, there’s going to be a mandatory buyback,” says Karl Mallon, CEO of Climate Valuation, a company that provides evidence-based climate risk analysis for property owners.
Planned and managed retreat recognise that there are some areas where no amount of mitigation or adaptation can protect against the sort of climate-related risks that individuals, homes and infrastructure will face. They will be unliveable.
Beyond unliveable
In some cases, unliveable literally means unsurvivable. “The thing that will possibly make places unliveable is water supply,” says Lesley Hughes, a biologist and climate scientist at Macquarie University and a director with the Climate Council of Australia. “If you run out of water, or have such huge water restrictions that you can’t function, that I think is perhaps going to be a driver of unliveability.”
It’s a prospect that some communities, particularly outback Indigenous communities, are already grappling with. In 2019, the largest remote Aboriginal town in Central Australia – Yuendumu, with a population of nearly 900 people, on the traditional lands of the Warlpiri – nearly ran out of drinking water.
Water insecurity is a huge issue for central Australia, particularly as many towns depend on groundwater aquifers which may provide limited supply, the water may be poor quality, and lack of rain means the aquifers don’t get recharged.
“Aboriginal people across the NT are already living through increasingly dangerous summers in poorly built houses, putting pressure on peoples’ bodies and compounding health concerns,” says Les Turner, CEO of the Central Land Council.
Even the regional NSW town of Dubbo, population more than 40,000, came dangerously close to running out of water in 2020 as the Macquarie River all but dried up.
Unliveability can also be economic. As the risk and cost of climate-related disasters increase, the insurance industry is tightening its belt. “There are places where you might be able to get [an insurance] policy, but you won’t be able to afford it,” Mallon says.
The number of people who are choosing either not to insure for a particular hazard because it would make premiums unaffordable, or can’t get insurance at all because of climate risks, is growing. A Climate Council report found in the top 10 most at-risk electorates – which includes Nicholls in Victoria, Richmond in NSW, Maranoa in Queensland and Hindmarsh in South Australia – around one in seven properties will be uninsurable by this decade’s end.
Without insurance, banks won’t offer a mortgage, which could soon see even multi-million-dollar coastal and bush properties become unsellable.
This is where planned retreat can offer a partial solution: councils buy back those properties or lands, and use them to create a buffer zone between the hazard and other properties. This has already been done by some coastal councils, Turner says, who turn the land into parks or return it to vegetated sand dunes. Unfortunately, Sydney’s property prices aren’t helping. “The real estate is so valuable now that my understanding is that that’s still a policy, but is now difficult to implement,” Turner says.
There is no easy answer to the question of where Australians will live in a climate-changed future. Like the idea that humanity can terraform Mars and relocate there – which ignores the fact that we can’t even fix the climate on our own planet – the idea that Australians can relocate to safer locations ignores the obvious. If those places were liveable, we would already be living there.
As Hughes says, “We have to work really hard to make sure we have a liveable environment by getting climate under control.”