Last week I spent a bit of time reading Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet by Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld. This short, accessible book (less than 120 pages plus endnotes) is a plea for a stronger approach to climate adaptation on the part of Australian governments.
They argue that we are now well past the point where we can prevent climate change – the Earth has already warmed by around one degree Celsius and further warming is locked in through processes of change already in place. To make matters worse, there is as yet no sign that global emissions are coming down.
In this context, they say that Australia’s climate policies, and much of our thinking and advocacy, is back to front. Governments are focused on reducing our emissions through the transition to renewables (although continuing to export coal and gas) and advocacy is focused on moving faster. The authors provide skeptical commentary on three of the most high-profile plans being discussed in policy and political circles – Saul Griffith’s ‘electrify everything’ plan, Alan Finkel’s ‘electro-state’ and Ross Garnaut’s ‘renewable energy superpower’. They see more barriers to success for each of these strategies than their authors acknowledge, in terms of the resources and industry capacity required and the likely international competition for the same green markets we are trying to capture.
However, their big problem is that the future trajectory of climate change will not be decided in Australia, but in the US, China, Europe and to a lesser extent India. They say that in the 1990s Australia had the chance to influence our global partners to reduce emissions, but our own quarter century of delay means that opportunity has passed. The climate has already changed and will continue to do so, even if these major powers go all out on emissions reduction. Since there is no sign so far that they are doing so, it is likely it will be bad.
This means that in their view we should be rebalancing our climate responses towards adaptation. The second half of their book focuses on how to do this. Their assessment is that Australia and Australians are currently ‘coping with’ climate change rather than adapting to it. When we feel the impacts of climate change – bigger bushfires, higher floods, more severe droughts, etc – we engage in relief efforts and rebuild, but we don’t have any systematic approach to adaptation to lessen the impact of future events. Commonwealth and State Governments have little more than vague, wordy strategy documents while local governments, who seem to understand the problems best, are short on resources and mainly engaging in holding operations like building levees and sea walls.
They compare Australia’s piecemeal approach with China, which has a national strategy for adaptation that is full of practical actions – seawalls to protect coastal cities, the creation of swamps and reforestation to absorb floodwater, agricultural programs to avoid food shortages, and many more. They would like to see something similar in Australia, which would be focused on some key ideas.
Prevention before cure. One of the obvious things we should do is stop building new things in a way that will leave people vulnerable. By way of example they point to councils which continue to allow development in flood-prone or coastal risk locations, despite knowing that these will not be sustainable.
Deciding whether to harden or retreat. In each situation where climate change creates new and increased risks, we need to have a systematic way of assessing whether it is better to try and engineer our way out of them – for instance by building levees and sea walls, or creating bigger irrigation systems to cope with drought – or to move out of the way.
Planned retreat. Where disasters happen and there is major damage, these present a great opportunity to engage in planned retreat. By way of example they cite the relocation of Grantham in Queensland after the 2011 flood, which meant that residents were safe when a similar flood hit in 2022. By contrast, relocation schemes in the Northern Rivers of NSW and in South East Queensland after the 2022 floods were voluntary, meaning many residents and businesses rebuilt in the same locations and are at risk of further flooding in future.
Contingency Planning. We need to be projecting the likely future impacts of climate change and making plans to respond. For instance, severe heat-waves result in heat stress for vulnerable people, particularly older people and children, and can kill. We can plan to reduce these risks, for instance by having heath thresholds at which school is cancelled, and air-conditioned places of refuge for older people.
‘Managing Neo-Nature’. This term refers to the proactive management of threatened species and ecosystems. Climate change is one of the key drivers of extinction, and it can mean that efforts to protect threatened species and ecosystems in situ are doomed to failure. One solution to this is to relocate key species to places which now match the climate conditions they evolved to live in.
A short book like this is not really able to do justice to the breadth and depth of what is required, so their examples are really just teasers. The book is a call to arms rather than a blueprint but if they are right, we sure need someone to come up with a blueprint.
Some thoughts
I’m not a big fan of Hamilton and Wilkenfeld’s ‘either/or’ framing of mitigation and adaptation. If you’ve read much of this site, you will know I think we need to do both. Climate change is not binary – the climate either changes or it doesn’t – it is a continuum and it can be worse or better depending on how much we emit from here on in. Although these authors are far from climate denier, ‘it’s too late’ is a tried and tested climate denier line. Nor do I love the argument that we shouldn’t bother ‘because China’ or ‘because the USA’ – even the USA itself uses this line. We have as much influence now as we had in the 1990s and incidentally the authors use lower estimates for Australia’s share of global emissions than those normally cited.
However, none of these issues are central to their message, and in this they are absolutely right. If you spend time trawling through government websites trying to get a handle on their approaches to adaptation, as I have, you are liable to come away frustrated by how hard they are to find and how underwhelming they are when you do eventually track them down. In my own community, while it’s been heartening so see some houses relocated or lifted as part of the State Government’s flood recovery program, it is worrying to see many of them simply restored to what they were, and I feel furious when I see homes that were under water in 2022 put on the market with zero disclosure of the flood risk.
Finally, what applies to Australia applies even more to social and affordable housing providers. We can and should make our own contributions to reducing emissions, but the heavy lifting has to be done by others. Our main challenge is to adapt to the change we know is coming.
We are generally building housing that will last 50 to 100 years. How do we build for the world of 2050, 2075 or 2100? In the absence of a clear government- or sector-wide adaptation strategy, and with limited resources, it’s easy for us to just do what we’ve always done, or to assume that if we follow the regulations we will be OK. Yet when our governments are not really thinking much about adaptation we can’t be confident that the existing standards nd regulations will serve us well and we need to do some extra work ourselves.
As I get time over the next little while I’ll be zeroing in on some of the key risks housing providers need to deal with, and some thoughts about the tools and knowledge we need to address each of them.
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