Temperatures are set to rise 2°C by the end of the next decade. There are many implications, and not just in rural areas, but in the cities and suburbs where most of us live...
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It’s 25 December 2015. I’m sitting with my family in my parents’ bedroom, unwrapping presents, munching Santa-shaped chocolate and feeling appropriately merry. Both of my parents’ phones ping at the same time; the festivities are pierced by their shared look of slack-faced dread. They receive text messages from the CFA if there is fire danger in the area, and it’s already building to be a hot day. Mum leans over to her phone, slowly swiping her finger across the screen. A pause.
“Oh, it’s just from Nancy. Wishing us a Merry Christmas!” A short, hard laugh. Mollified, we turn back to opening presents – but there’s a strange mood in the air.
“I hate summer these days,” my dad mutters.
That day, they were lucky. The fires went somewhere else. The people in Wye River on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road…not so lucky.
My parents live on the outer fringe of Melbourne, less than an hour’s drive from the city centre, and they are no strangers to the threat of bushfires. In the summer of 2014, their street was evacuated. When they were finally allowed to return, the view had changed: they could see razed trees and blackened grass, while doing dishes at the kitchen sink. They’ve noticed as summers have come earlier, as grass dries more quickly underfoot, as the fecund bush has turned into piles of tinder waiting to be lit. They pack their valuable mementoes in the car come November, and leave them there until February has safely passed.
Last year was the hottest on record, and climate modelling around the world is showing that the warming of our planet is steadily, consistently, unrelenting increasing. Christmas Days filled with dread and car boots packed with old photos are becoming the reality for more and more Australians – and not just those living in rural areas.
When Peter Rau, chief officer of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB), looks out of his office window in Melbourne, he sees concrete, roads and skyscrapers that thousands of people live and work in every day. And he’s just as worried about them as he is about those living where my parents are.
“I want people within the urban environment to have a plan, just the way a lot of people in the bush areas have plans,” he says. “We’re not immune from those risks because we happen to live in what is a wonderful city… Melburnians need to be aware of that.”
The MFB has an interactive map on their website that highlights high-risk fire areas within the city of Melbourne; there are almost 50. One is Yarra Bend Park, a 260-hectare bushy sanctuary that sits 4km from the CBD. When you walk through it during summer, grass the colour of wheat crunches beneath your shoes, just like it does in deep Victorian bush. But this park is smack in the middle of a city of more than four million people. Above the expanse of drooping eucalypts you can see clusters of silver-blue skyscrapers.
And as summer comes earlier, stays longer and burns hotter, and extreme weather events increase, places like Yarra Bend Park become more and more perilous. When I ask Rau about the risks that climate change poses, he is unequivocal.
“We’re dealing with an increasing number of fires, increasing flood events, increasing storm events – as somebody who’s been in the industry for over 30 years, you know that you are a lot busier,” he says. “You’re certainly not going to find many climate change sceptics on the end of a fire hose.”
Although a single day of Darwin weather in Melbourne doesn’t change much, when you shift climate averages, changes start to happen in vegetation types, rain patterns (notably, for most parts of Australia, much less of it) and fire seasons. Then you add in more extreme events as well.
And even if fires don’t reach the inner suburbs, the plenitude of concrete won’t stop heat. During Victoria’s Black Saturday disaster in 2009, 173 people died from the fires. An additional 374 people died from the heatwave.
“More people lose their lives as a result of heat than any other natural disasters in Australia,” says Rau. He explains that the MFB doesn’t just fight fires – some of their core business is actually emergency medical response. If you call 000 because someone is not breathing or their heart has stopped, the MFB will often be there alongside the ambulance. And during a heatwave, they are run off their feet.
“During a normal day, today if you like, there would have been about 16 heart attacks across Melbourne. During Black Saturday and the heatwaves, we had about 90,” he says.
"You're certainly not going to find many climate change sceptics on the end of a fire hose."
The risks of extreme weather for urban populations are not contained to the desiccated southeast corner of Australia. We’ve seen these impacts in urban environments across the country already, and those dangers get greater as cities dilate and people seeking affordable places to live sprawl into the previously underpopulated fringes.
In 2003, lightning strikes started fires on the outskirts of Canberra. With hurtling winds and temperatures above 40°C, the fire rapidly spread into the outer suburbs. Four people were killed and 500 houses were lost.
In January 2015, following a bad fire season in Perth the previous year, the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Fire and Emergency Services, Steve Fewster, issued a warning on the ABC to the city’s residents: “The rural-urban interface extends right into our city and there are very few parts of Perth where people are not at risk from bushfire at some time”.
In January 2015, the hilly suburbs of Adelaide were threatened by the biggest fires seen in the area since Ash Wednesday in 1983. The fires threatened townships along the Mount Lofty Ranges that are now much more heavily populated than they were in the 80s.
In late 2010, Brisbane residents were faced with unprecedented flooding as storms savaged Queensland. The Brisbane River swelled, 20,000 properties were inundated and parts of the CBD were evacuated. In Toowoomba, a city of more than 100,000 people, a flash flood raced right through the centre of town.
“We’re going to see an increase in the frequency of these things,” says Karl Braganza, the manager of the climate modelling section of the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
“The sort of events that might have happened once every summer are going to happen multiple times per summer. The sort of events that happen once every 10 or 20 years might happen every year. And so, for the Bureau, that’s really salient for us,” he says. He refers back to 2013 when there was a record heatwave that affected four states at once, which meant fire weather across all those states. There were approximately 80,000 to 120,000 fire fighters on standby, and BOM had to fly in relief forecasters from the US.
These events are not only incredibly dangerous – they’re expensive. And as extreme weather events increase, the bill goes up. The estimated cost of the 2010–11 Queensland floods was more the $2 billion. A hailstorm lashing Sydney is a multi-billion dollar event. And insurers are well aware of this.
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Kate Davies lives in Newcastle, in the inner-city suburb of Merewether – a 10-minute walk from the CBD. A year after she bought her house, she got a notice from her insurance company saying they would not be able to insure her anymore because of the risk of flood. The area around her house had been flooded before she bought there – in the infamous 2007 “Pasha Bulker” storms (where the eponymous container ship ran aground on Nobby’s Beach) – and now the whole suburb was deemed high-risk.
“It’s not that low-lying, there’s even hills in the area,” says Davies. “But they decided that it was too risky.” She did manage to insure her property with a larger insurance company, for more money. She says the whole experience was eye-opening for her. “Climate change is clearly occurring, we’ve had two significant events within Newcastle in the last 10 years, so it’s really important to make sure we have flood coverage because we know that’s possible.”
A study published by US-based research group Climate Central looked at sea-level rises around the world. Under a 2°C warming scenario, which is what we are slated to reach by 2030, it found that Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide will be hit hard, with an estimated 200,000 homes at risk of going under. In Perth and Melbourne, each city has 14,000 homes in at-risk areas.
And if you are able to get insurance on your property, the premiums could become crippling. In their 2014 report, Buyers Beware, the Climate Institute found that, at the high end of climate projections, insurance premiums could be expected to increase by up to 92 per cent over the life of a standard, 30-year mortgage. In some locations that had been deemed high-risk, insurance companies refused to supply the Climate Institute quotes for the properties. This never happened in testing done in low-risk areas.
Following what the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) dubbed the “angry summer” of 2010–11, premiums around parts of Queensland and northern NSW ballooned. The Mayor of Clarence Valley Council, Richie Williamson, told the Sydney Morning Herald that premium prices were a “very real issue” at that time for people in his area. With annual premiums costing as much as $10,000, he said nobody near the Clarence River had flood insurance, despite being highly vulnerable.
"At the high end of climate projections, insurance premiums could be expected to increase by up to 92 per cent over the life of a standard, 30-year mortgage."
And we can only expect it to escalate. When approached, the ICA referenced a report from Munich Re, which predicted that the cost of natural disasters to the Australian economy was likely to rise from $6.3 billion in 2016 to $23 billion by 2050. This is a problem. As Australian insurance companies pay out claims, they in turn call on their reinsurer (usually a large, global company), who pay a proportion of it. As companies claim more, the reinsurers raise their premiums, which are then passed on to policyholders. So when claims are high, the average insurance-holder pays more, especially if they’re in an area at risk of it happening again.
Sharon Pope is the Manager Integrated Planning for the council of the City of Lake Macquarie, a picturesque waterside area on the outskirts of Newcastle. She was concerned about what she was hearing.
“The reinsurers, Swiss reinsurance and the others, actually said ‘Look, Australia is coming up as quite risky. You’ve got a small population, we pull in a small amount of money through premiums, yet the payouts we’re making are large because of bushfires, floods, hail storms’. They’re just saying ‘nup’, and they’ve jacked up the reinsurance component of the insurance.”
The council was apprehensive. They had made plans in the event of flooding of their lakeside neighbourhoods before, but as sea levels were constantly on the rise, that plan was quickly becoming redundant.
“We realised this wasn’t a process we’d ever been through before and council didn’t have the answers. We were looking at what’s been going on around the world and it’s quite clear that no-one really has the answers. It’s just a new problem that we’re all grappling with.”
So they did something different: they went to the community and asked them to help come up with a plan. They held meetings, a group from the community was elected as representatives, and they worked together for two years to invent a whole new plan for that area, including a cost/benefit analysis to justify their actions to any future governments.
“People use the story of the frog in the pot of water and it’s just slowly warming up and you don’t really notice; I think that’s how it’s going to be with sea level rise,” says Pope.
And now they have a plan for their community that reaches out until 2100. For the most part, it’s pretty common sense. For example, they predicted that council will have to rebuild the roads twice between now and 2100, so each time council does reconstruction, they raise the road 30 centimetres. It may be marginally more expensive, but the main cost was always going to be there anyway. Some of the actions won’t have to happen for years yet, depending on the rate of sea-level rise. But as the report says: “Planning for these future actions is required now, however, to make sure the necessary land, money and technical know-how is available when needed.” And with a realisation that 80 per cent of properties in the area would eventually be left flooded if nothing were done, Pope felt they really didn’t have a choice.
“If there was no plan, the individuals living there would be left with a property that would be unusable. No-one wants to insure the property, no-one wants to loan money for other people to buy the property, so they end up with an asset they can’t do anything with, and over time it becomes flooded on a more regular basis and they just have a horrible quality of life,” she says. Now, the consultation process is being rolled out across the city. When Pope sees rapidly rising insurance premiums in flood-affected areas around the country, she feels like they’re a little more prepared.
“We’re hoping down the track that people will be able to present this plan as evidence that insurance companies need, to show that they’re not higher risk, and then they can get lower premiums. It just highlights that not having a plan, and not dealing with the issue is not going to help your cause.”
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All of these figures, plans and predictions are based on the idea that we need to drastically limit our carbon emissions so our planet will only warm to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with an aim to limit it to 1.5°C. Karl Braganza points out to me that to limit it to 1.5°C, we would actually have to take carbon out of the atmosphere, something we don’t know how to do yet. If we continue business as usual, we’re likely to hit 4°C of warming.
When I ask Braganza how much carbon should be in the atmosphere, he sighs.
“I mean if you ask a traffic engineer what’s the safest speed to drive at, it’s 5km an hour. So if you ask a climate scientist how much we should be changing the atmospheric chemistry by, it’d be zero. Don’t change it at all. So somewhere between that decision, and something like 60 kilometres an hour because it’s a practical limit, you come up with two degrees.” But, he emphasises, carbon emissions will have to be drastically reduced to achieve that. We really need to slow things down: now. In the past, when changes to the atmosphere have happened this quickly, it has been when an asteroid has hit, or there were massive volcanic eruptions. And when that has occurred in the past, there were mass extinctions; species did not have a chance to adapt.
“What you now want to do is hit the brakes on the car,” Braganza says. “Before it just careers out of control.”
What is needed now – like the slowly flooding City of Lake Macquarie, like country people facing bushfire season – is a plan.
by Katherine Smyrk
This article first appeared in The Big Issue.
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