The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has recently put more of its resources into investigating the intersections of climate change and urban and housing policy. I’m planning to feature articles on some of that research over the next little while, starting with this one: Improving Australian climate change adaption strategies: learning from international experience, by Francesca Perugia, Steven Rowley and Mohammad Swapan from Curtin University.
Adaptation often seems to be the poor cousin of climate change policy. Mitigation gets all the headlines and all the money – big billions to roll out renewable energy, incentives for EVS and so on. It is also the site for controversy and conflict – should we be opening new coal and gas fields? (We absolutely should not!). Can renewables provide 100% of our electricity, or will we need nuclear or a little bit of gas to fill the gaps?
By contrast, adaptation only gets a look-in when there is a natural disaster and people are trying to decide quickly how they can both get everything back quickly and prepare for the next one. Yet adaptation is complex and requires long-term, integrated planning.
The Curtin University team have dipped their toe in the water in three complementary ways. Firstly, they have taken a look at the Commonwealth and State policies that relate to adaptation, and the departments and authorities charged with implementing this agenda. The picture that emerges is complex and confusing. At both Commonwealth and State levels there are a range of departments and statutory bodies responsible for different parts of the agenda. Typically these will include departments responsible for environment, agriculture, transport, emergency services, water resources and urban and regional planning, as well as specific State and national authorities. These bodies have a wide range of policies and strategies they are responsible for implementing in various ways. And this is without delving too far into the local government level, where a lot of the practical implementation sits!
The second thing the researchers do is take a ‘deep dive’ into three international examples of climate adaptation, one each related to the three big natural hazards Australians face – floods, bushfires and cyclones.
The flood example comes from Tulsa, Arkansas in the USA, a city of about 400,000 people which is prone to regular flooding. The adaptation strategy there was implemented by the local government authority with funding from all three levels of government. Strategies involve planning restrictions and property acquisitions in flood-prone areas, waterway restoration and preservation of drainage pathways, and community driven education and resilience programs, all driven within a long-term planning framework.
The bushfire example comes from Riba-roja de Turia in Spain, a small community of 20,000 in the middle of a National Park which experienced 40 bushfire events between 2000 and 2016. Once again, the project has a long-term, community driven focus that includes community education and resilience, the planting of low fire hazard borders between urban and forest areas, and the development of a well-managed hydraulic system that uses recycled water for both fire prevention and firefighting.
The cyclone example is the My Safe Home program in Florida, USA which is slap bang in the hurricane zone. This program, which ran between 2008 and 2010 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and again from 2022-24 after Hurricane Ian, includes free home inspections to advise on hurricane resilience improvements, matched grants of up to $10,000 for owner-occupiers to carry out works to strengthen their home, and a community education program.
Although the Florida example is somewhat simpler than the others, what these examples point to is an approach that includes long-term planning, high levels of community engagement and what are known as ‘nature-based solutions’ – that is, solutions which ‘respect and reinforce the ecological system’ and combine restoring and strengthening natural systems with making people safer.
By contrast, Australia has struggled to come to grips with the long-term adaptations that are needed as the climate changes. The team carried out interviews with six experts in the field to try to gain an insight into why this might be. They identify a number of factors.
One is that “…the governance structure and distribution of roles and responsibilities among the three government tiers are major barriers to adopting international strategies.” Responsibility for local and regional level solutions is split between State and local governments, while the Commonwealth government has the financial wherewithal to mobilise resources towards adaptation but not the formal responsibility. In all these levels of government multiple Departments and authorities hold different aspects of adaptation, increasing the complexity. Hence, the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy is full of worthy sentiment but short on action, and States and Councils vary widely in their approaches.
A second aspect is the short-term nature of political decision-making. Governments around Australia are typically up for election every three or four years (depending on where you are) and governments change fairly frequently. This means they are focused at the political level on immediate ‘wins’ and deliverables, rather than on long-term change. Along with this goes a focus on short-term economic stability which pushes governments to restoring ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible rather than thinking and planning for greater long-term resilience.
Finally there has not been any serious attempt to engage local and regional communities as active partners in adaptation. Government decision-making processes tend to be ‘behind closed doors’ and although communities may be consulted they will rarely be actively engaged. This means there is not strong community ownership of strategies, and often not a lot of understanding of the imperatives of adaptation.
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It seems to me that this research, like Australia’s approach to adaptation (and indeed to climate change overall) is just beginning to scrape the surface. This is no criticism of the authors – adaptation is a big subject and you couldn’t possibly hope to cover it all in one research project. This project focuses on natural disasters which is certainly important but there are other things too. How can we adapt our housing and communities for temperatures significantly hotter than we are used to? How do we ensure food security through increasingly unpredictable weather patterns? How will we support remote communities in places where the temperature will become literally unliveable for periods during each summer? How will we deal with the likely flood of climate refugees from neighbouring countries, or from further afield?
In a sense, this just highlights how much work we have to do. Natural disaster risk is as good a place as any to begin. What we need with this, as with housing issues overall, is for governments to:
Think and plan long term – over ten or twenty years – and stick with their plans.
Be prepared to work across boundaries – across the three levels of government and with communities and NGOs.
Work at a variety of levels, from the local up to the national, depending on the issue.
Mobilise sufficient resources over time.
Accept that nature can’t be controlled and overridden, and learn instead to work with and preserve natural systems.
In a wealthy country like Australia the task of adaptation isn’t beyond us, especially if we also work internationally to rapidly reduce our emissions, but we need to start doing it.
Resources
You can read the full AHURI report, Perugia, F., Rowley, S. and Swapan, M. (2023) Improving Australian climate change adaptation strategies: learning from international experience, AHURI Final Report No. FR 411, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/FR411.
The Australian Government’s National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy is here.
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