Queensland, the state of floods and cyclones that devastated
property, has become Australia's laboratory for sustainable
building, for creating resilient homes, offices and structures in
the face of climatic volatility.
In a radical scheme, Grantham residents who had confronted a deadly
mountain of water in the floods, have been invited to apply for
land swaps to higher ground after the small southeast town was
declared the first designated reconstruction area under the new
Queensland Reconstruction Authority's powers. The local council is
working with reconstruction authority to create the land
swaps.
Green Cross Australia, the non profit group working with
developers, insurers and the Property Council of Australia to
encourage sustainable thinking, plans to launch a Harden Up portal
in August.
The scheme is a world first. Using social media, it aims to makes
people aware of the history of the weather patterns in their
region, helps prepare them to protect their homes, families and
communities and encourages them to share their insights. People
will be able to tap into the portal to assess the weather patterns
in their suburb or town over the last 150 years, using data from
the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO.
They will be taken on interactive multimedia tours and encouraged
to share their insights through a page on Facebook. The
exercise is not only about creating awareness, it's about
empowering communities and giving them the know-how and information
needed to create more resilient housing.
Green Cross Australia has also run Build It Back Green
http://builditbackgreen.org workshops that seek to reduce household
greenhouse gas emissions, improve community resilience through good
design and engagement, invest in green school infrastructure,
invest in commercial, government and public buildings, invest in
green infrastructure projects and develop solutions for low
income residents that reduce energy, water and waste.
Significantly, the Build It Back Green model is now being used by
7000 Victorians whose homes were destroyed in the Black Saturday
fires. It is also now being taken up by residents in Perth who
faced the bushfires there in January.
Green Cross chief executive officer Mara Bun says Queensland has
become the "test bed of thinking about resilience."
"We think this could change the world,'' Bun says.
"What we are about is correcting an informational asymmetry. The
insurers, all levels of government and developers have the
information. We want to wake up the punters."
Once they have the right information, she says, they can take steps
to creating resilient homes and buildings.
Building something that's resilient is more than just engineering.
It goes beyond replacing plasterboard walls with masonry where the
water flows off quickly, or building houses on more solid
foundations, or ensuring combustible materials are kept away from
property. That's the easy part.
Resilient buildings and infrastructure are created through planning
and preparation. It's about anticipating and being ready for the
flash floods, rising seas and bushfires. That requires changes in
planning laws and building codes.
Allen Kearns, deputy chief of CSIRO Sustainable
Ecosystems says there needs to be a distinction between
engineering resilience and the adaptive capacity of people. In the
end, he says, it is all about the ability of people to cope and
adjust.
"You could have a resilient building material like corrugated iron
or you might have bricks that are more resilient to flooding, but
the planning as to where those buildings are located and those roof
types and wall types will be even more important,'' Kearns
says.
"Communities with good information access will do better in a
crisis."
Yasi should be a benchmark for preparation
He says the amount of preparation that went into getting
communities ready for Cyclone Yasi should be a benchmark for other
less spectacular but more frequent weather events. The fact that
many buildings in south east Queensland withstood the cyclone and
nobody was killed is testament to the planning and preparation
processes that authorities had gone through, using their experience
from previous cyclones.
With the freakish storms that have ravaged Sydney and Melbourne and
with bushfires, we need to look at the work that went into
preparing towns for Cyclone Yasi, Kearns says.
"These are events which are below the radar compared to the big
cycles but the costs of them are likely to be significant when you
think they will be affecting much broader geographies,'' he
says.
"It's this slow creeping change that causes maintenance costs,
scheduling problems and ultimately you will start seeing systemic
failure of infrastructure as these type of events become more
frequent as the damage costs starts to mount."
Alistair Coulstock, senior ecologically sustainable design
specialist at engineering firm Aurecon, says the key to resilient
building is to focus on long term issues like climate change and
peak oil, and plan around that.
"It's not just about the buildings themselves,'' Coulstock says.
"From a planning perspective, we need to start looking at the long
term trends.
"In every part of business in western society, we have a very short
term focus on getting returns and unfortunately , that doesn't give
us flexibility in managing long term trends."
He says the Federal government needs to provide a national
framework for councils. Ultimately, that could mean changes in
planning processes. "It would be a collaborative piece to look at
the long term trends, and turn them into strategies and plans for
each local government environment," he says.
Does that mean buildings would become more expensive? Yes, he says,
but so would everything else with climate change and peak
oil.
Many agree with the work of Green Cross: the public needs to be
empowered with the knowledge to act. As the events of Cyclone Yasi
showed, it's about getting the information out there so that people
are better prepared.
Caryn Kakas, executive director of the Property Council's
residential development council says the first step to creating
resilient buildings is to map out areas most at risk to floods,
storm surge, rising sea levels, and bushfires.
"What we haven't done very well as a country is substantially
map out the risk and explain it to communities so that they can
understand their risk and that local government can
understand their risk and therefore plan for it,'' Kakas
says.
"It's very difficult to identify the risk you have and proactively
build for it if you don't understand what your risk profile
is.
"In some cases, it's about making sure the infrastructure around it
can handle those risks like drainage systems or making sure you
have levees and other fortified infrastructure around to ensure you
are okay.
"In other cases, it's about making sure the building is resilient
to say a changing environment where we don't know how great the
risk factor is going to be."
Indeed, getting the infrastructure right could be even more
critical than the building itself, she says. A property, no matter
how resilient, will be hit hard when roads are flooded and drainage
systems overflow. "The infrastructure has a substantial flow
on effect,'' she says. "It doesn't matter what we do with the
buildings, if the infrastructure isn't right, the buildings are
substantially impacted by the increased risk profile."
She says planning decisions "should be based on science and
certainty so that we can actually plan for and protect against
potential environmental risk".
And that can only happen with sufficient preparation and
information. "The ideal scenario is that the Federal Government
takes the lead in this area to make sure local governments are
provided with data that's needed and that we are using that
national mapping so that they can make planning decisions around
science," she says.
She says the fact that towns like Tully, Innisfail and Townsville
withstood the impact of Cyclone Yasi is an example of how forward
planning for cyclones creates resilience. The same would apply for
other weather events.
"Any of the buildings that were built there after the last changes
in the building code from about 10 -20 years ago, they withstood
it,'' she says. "There was no issue.
"We had done the modelling, we had actually done the science and
actually understood what was required of buildings. The homes
that predated all of that were the ones that were damaged
"We had the emergency preparedness because we understood the risk
profile of that region."
Still, the Property Council of Australia has stopped short of
recommending more radical changes. While supporting the work of
Green Cross, the executive director of the council's
Queensland division Kathy Mac Dermott says there is no need
to change building codes and planning laws. What about long term
planning and preparing communities for climatic shifts and sudden
changes in weather patterns? The market, she says, will take
care of it.
"The market will demand the resilience and some of it will be
because it makes perfect sense to do it,'' Mac Dermott says. "You
don't want to keep having to repair and rebuild after natural
disasters.
"I don't think there will need to be changes necessarily.
Developers will respond to it and do it because that's what their
tenants and owners will need."
She says there is no need to act until the flood inquiry brings
down its findings.