Lismore’s library reopened this week, more than three years after the devastating flood that cracked its foundation slab and destroyed 29,000 books.
It’s a good news story. People from all over Australia donated books and money to rebuild a library for the flood-hit New South Wales city. “This is a major step in our recovery and rebuild,” Lismore’s mayor Steve Krieg told the ABC.
For the citizens of Ingham, recovery has yet to begin. The town of nearly 5,000 in north Queensland is still under several feet of water. Two people have died, and residents have no running water or access to fresh food.
The floods are the result of a slow-moving tropical low channelling moist air from the Pacific monsoon into drenching rainfall; the village of Rollingstone recorded an astonishing 702mm in 24 hours. As Steve Turton pointed out, the catastrophe bears the unmistakable imprint of climate change. This year’s monsoon is the latest to ever arrive.
The damage in north Queensland has been extensive. The vital Bruce Highway, the main road artery, has been cut between Townsville and Ingham, after a bridge at Ollera Creek was washed out. The army has been called in to build a temporary span, but it won’t be able to support heavy trucks.
Damage in Ingham is also severe. The town is inundated, with many houses badly affected. According to Queensland Premier David Crisafulli, an Ingham boy himself, “the devastation is quite frankly, incredible”. Crisafulli had to helicopter in to his childhood home town on Wednesday, vowing that “I am here to deliver what this community needs.”
History suggests this probably won’t be the last time Crisafulli flies into a community devastated by natural disaster. Recent years have seen a string of floods, cyclones and extreme weather events across the Sunshine State, from floods in Ipswich and Brisbane in 2011, to Cyclone Yasi, Cyclone Oswald, Townsville’s 2019 flood, and more floods in 2022.
In fact, Crisafulli was on the scene back in 2013 as a junior minister after the catastrophic Bundaberg floods, which cost more than $1 billion. Even back then, he was calling for better infrastructure. But rebuilding bridges and levies is easy. Protecting low-lying suburbs of Brisbane and Townsville from floods is a lot harder.
Guardian Australia has a poignant piece up this week by Rachel Mounsey, interviewing survivors of the Mallacoota fires five years on. Some residents still haven’t rebuilt their houses, and the trauma of that summer lives on. As the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience points out in its report on “Australia’s riskscape”, disaster recovery is long and complex. While politicians appear on television at the height of the crisis, vowing to rebuild, it can take many years and multiple election cycles to get homes repaired and infrastructure fixed.
Climate-fuelled natural disasters are really expensive. Townsville’s 2019 flood cost $1.24 billion and killed five people. Oswald killed six and cost $2.4 billion. The floods of 2022 killed 22 and cost $4.8 billion. The cost of the 2011 floods was so large that Julia Gillard’s government imposed a special income tax levy.
Our politicians are not oblivious to the scale of the adaptation challenge. Labor’s Murray Watt spent a busy couple of years improving federal disaster preparedness, and his replacement Jenny McAllister has also been in Townsville this week. The National Climate Service has been overhauled after a review by Mary O’Kane, and the National Emergency Management Agency had a budget boost last May.
Watt and McAllister also established a new National Adaptation Policy Office and a new federal adaptation strategy is coming. Even so, current plans at federal and state levels are nowhere near what’s required. Most importantly, where will the money come from?
Once you start to think seriously about climate adaptation, the staggering scale of the task becomes apparent. A recent paper in Nature modelled what researchers call the “economic commitment” implied by climate change — the spending that would be required by a warmer and more disaster-prone world. The figure they came up with was US$38 trillion. A slightly more sober exercise by Deloitte Access Economics put the figure for Australia between 2020 and 2060 at $1.2 trillion.
You may not believe such figures: they are projections and predictions, after all. But it’s a simple fact that the cost of disasters keeps escalating. One recent estimate of the impact of January’s fires in Los Angeles puts the damage at US$250 billion. The insurance cost of 2024 hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US has been estimated at between US$35 and US$55 billion. North American wildfires are thought to have cost $67 billion between 2017 and 2024 — not counting LA this year.
Losses at this scale are uninsurable. Private insurers rely on a business model that pools risk across large numbers of policy holders, and assumes that insurance payouts will be sporadic and predictable. A recent article by Fitch suggested that the impact of the LA fires could eat up one third of the “catastrophe budgets” of European reinsurance firms. Big insurer State Farm responded to the LA fires by seeking an emergency hike in premiums by an average of 22%, while other insurers are getting out of insuring in California altogether. Insurance is already difficult to obtain in many parts of northern Australia.
As private insurers exit, governments are inevitably called on to step up. The result, as in Florida, are state or federal governments taking on hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars of risk.
The problem is exacerbated by confusing climate adaptation with disaster response. Much of what governments do after disasters is not adaptation, but crisis response. Swift boat rescues, disaster relief payments to victims and urgent repairs to critical infrastructure are all necessary, but they don’t do anything to future-proof communities for the hotter and more dangerous world ahead.
Adaptation is not all downside, of course. Retrofitting and rebuilding infrastructure genuinely can build back better, as homeowners and governments invest in newer and smarter materials. Lismore’s new library has a ground floor hardened for flooding, and all its computers and electronics are now on the top floor.
Some spy a chance to make money: investment firm Wellington recently touted the “investment opportunities” of adaptation opening up in sectors like engineering, water treatment and air conditioning. The insurance industry is also adapting, offering new policies such as “parametric insurance” that pay out a set sum for an agreed set of circumstances.
But much climate adaptation will simply be deadweight loss. Roads, rail, schools, hospitals and homes will all get more expensive. Some assets will never be rebuilt, for lack of finance or motivation. Some industries will shrink or even disappear, like alpine skiing or Great Barrier Reef tourism. Receding coastlines will reduce property values… by literally subtracting the property itself. There is no upside to lives lost, children traumatised, or fertile agricultural land turned to dust.
Meanwhile, the 1.5 degrees warming target of the Paris agreement has nearly arrived, and 2 degrees looks increasingly locked in. As the climate scientists remind us, this year is the coolest year of the rest of your life.
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