From bushfires, coastal hazards, cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, and floods to heatwaves, landslides, severe thunderstorms, tornados, and tsunamis, Australia faces risks from natural hazards – any of which could have a devastating impact on communities and the environment.
The threat isn’t idle. Nearly 200 declared natural disasters hammered NSW alone between 2009 and 2019. Between 1970 and 2015, natural disasters took over 500 lives.
For those left behind, the financial hit is severe. The yearly cost of natural disasters in the state comes in at around AUD 3.6 billion, according to estimates.
That figure is likely to rise, according to experts. Climatologists predict climate-related disasters will grow even more frequent and severe.
Meanwhile, the state’s population continues to creep deeper into areas long exposed to natural hazards, e.g., floodplains, coastal zones, and areas adjacent to bushland.
What can communities and local councils do to ensure natural hazard resilience? Answering that query is the NSW state government, which recently released a Strategic Guide for Planning for Natural Hazards, which seeks to inform land use policy at the council level.
The guide, part of a larger package, represents a commitment under the State Infrastructure Strategy 2018 – 2038, supported by the 2017 State Level Risk Assessment. The guide also addresses recommendations made under the 2020 NSW Bush Fire Inquiry and the 2020 Royal Commission in Natural Disaster Arrangements.
Key Takeaways from NSW Bush Fire Inquiry & Royal Commission in Natural Disaster Arrangements
What’s in it? Here are a few things you should know:
1. Plan for the natural hazards likeliest to happen
Disasters are cataclysmic. They, by definition, cause untold human, material, economic, and/or environmental losses. So, why not prepare for all of them?
The simple answer is we can’t. State and local governments have limited resources – they can’t afford to expend those resources preparing for all possible disasters.
Nor should they. Indeed, it’s not best practice to plan for hazards unlikely to happen.
The strategic guide codifies this logic, honing in on the hazards likeliest to affect the state. Those hazards include:
- Bushfires
- Coastal hazards
- Cyclones
- Droughts
- Earthquakes
- Floods
- Heatwaves
- Landslides
- Severe thunderstorms
- Tornadoes
- Tsunamis
What about climate change? The guide doesn’t identify climate change as its own natural hazard. But it does acknowledge the effect recent climate patterns are having on existing hazards, i.e., making them more frequent and intense.
As such, it’s important in land-use planning studies, such as this, to understand the climate projections of the nation’s leading climate experts. Those projections include:
- Increasing temperatures, i.e., more extremely hot days and fewer extremely cold days
- Ongoing sea level rise
- Further ocean warming and acidification
- More frequent, extensive, intense, and longer-standing marine heatwaves
- Decrease in cool-season rainfall
- More intense heavy rainfall
- Increase in the number of high-fire weather danger days and a longer fire season
- Greater proportion of high-intensity storms, with ongoing large variations from year to year
2. Understand natural hazard risk
The risk picture, indeed, looks bleak. What should communities and their elected policy makers do?
A simple thing policy makers can do is understand natural hazard risk. That way those same bodies can implement the correct risk-controlling policies.
Not all natural processes turn into natural hazard risks, though. They only do when the following three factors interact; those elements are:
- Presence or probability of a natural hazard
- People and/or property exposed to the hazard
- Characteristics of a community making it vulnerable to the damaging effects of the hazard
From there, organisations can reduce risk by decreasing the contribution from one or more of the three component elements while not increasing others or increasing them to a lesser extent.
Simple enough? Well, not really.
People aren’t widgets or figures on a spreadsheet. Nor is controlling risk to an acceptable level an academic exercise.
Identifying the tolerable degree of risk can only be done through consultation with state and local government, experts, risk and emergency managers, and members of the community. Acceptable risk itself is a risk management decision that involves:
- Balancing risk from natural hazards
- The costs of living with the risk
- The benefits of occupying at-risk areas, e.g., floodplains, bushland, or exposed coastal areas
- Consideration of a reasonable level of service to the community
3. Strive for disaster resilience
Of course, as natural hazard risk increases, the capacity of communities and their management systems to be resilient will be challenged.
The point, then, is to reach a certain level of disaster resilience – defined as the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.
That sort of outcome will require continuing commitment and collective responsibility across all levels of government, as well as at the business, non-profit, and individual level.
What then are the guiding principles to support communities to reach this level of resilience to natural hazards through strategic land-use planning? The guide singles out eight. They include:
- Be strategic, consider risks from natural hazards early
- Protect vulnerable people and assets
- Adopt an ‘all-hazards’ approach
- Involve the community in conversations about risk and values
- Plan for emergency response and evacuation
- Be information driven and evidence based
- Plan to build and rebuild for the future with a changing climate
- Understand the relationship between natural processes and natural hazards
Finally, NSW faces acute disaster risk, that only continuous planning efforts can control. Councils have a clear role to play, here, developing best-practice plans and implementing the systems that will keep communities resilient.
Councils don’t need to act alone. Critical event management technologies can help, as well.
Acting as EOCs for governments, solutions, like Noggin, provide all the information and tools needed to prepare and manage any incident effectively through its entire lifecycle, keeping teams following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture. To learn more, request a demonstration of Noggin.
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