Threat to thousands of coastal homes, infrastructure
by Ernie Davitt, National Affairs Editor, ASM
Australian emergency management planners and the insurance industry are digesting the latest predictions of the fallout from global warming, which suggest that the speed of climate change has been significantly underestimated. Ernie Davitt has the story.
The predictions put hundreds of thousands of Australian homes as well as ports, harbours and airports near the ocean potentially at risk from rising sea levels. Federal Government officials have estimated that building assets valued at over $33 trillion are located within 200 metres of the present day high water mark.
Organisations like Geoscience Australia are undertaking long-term work to help evaluate how much of that building stock and other national infrastructure might be prone to future sea inundation.
With the Insurance Council of Australia estimating that almost two million households in Australia have no home or contents insurance coverage, the cost of a catastrophic coastal disaster to the Australian Government and the community could be staggering.
In a submission to the Federal Government in early 2008, the Council said there was high potential for major flooding to occur in residential areas around Australia. It labeled 170,000 homes nationally as having a high risk of flooding, given current climate change projections.
The Council urged governments to develop a single national flood mapping model for the whole of Australia. Despite agreement by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that such a model should be produced, progress was slow because of the complexity of the problem.
The Insurance Council said the Brisbane City Council’s Floodwise program was a good example of Government taking a lead role in ensuring appropriate flood mitigation programs for high risk homes. It said the industry wanted to engage with all levels of Government to achieve a similar outcome across Australia.
The council said the first and most critical steps for addressing the issue of flood prone land needed to be:
• establishment of effective mitigation measures; and
• restrictions on flood-prone land being released at the local Government level.
The Insurance Council said it was vital that Government moved forward on the issue in a coordinated way and with the intent of undertaking a fully-funded single national flood mapping model.
Developing consistent flood mapping had been a stated goal of COAG for some time, ‘however the complexities of the problem and competing priorities appear to have delayed delivery of any significant Government solution’.
A senior climate change official, Dr Jo Mummery, Head of the Adaptation and Science Branch in the Federal Department of Climate Change, said more than 80 per cent of Australians lived in the coastal zone, with about 700,000 homes within 3km of the coast and less than six metres above sea level.
Speaking on the first day of the Coast to Coast 2008 Conference in Darwin in August, Dr Mummery said ports, harbours and airports near the ocean were also vulnerable to the immediate effects of climate change.
“There are vulnerabilities all around the Australian coastline,” she said. “It is an issue of significant magnitude and it does need proper assessment and all governments working together to minimise the risks and ensure there is as little damage as possible.
Dr Mummery said initial work on the National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment – to be handed to the Federal Government by the end of the year – hadn’t taken elevations and other scientific factors into account.
“This really is very early work and many more factors need to be taken into account before we have concrete projections,” she explained. “Although one thing is for certain: it is going to be a negative story...leading to damage of assets and loss of value.”