(AU SMH) Make No Mistake: These Floods Are Climate Change Playing Out In Real Time

Sydney Morning Herald - Blanche Verlie | Lauren Rickards

Time to adapt: the flooding in Lismore this week. Credit:Elise Derwin

Authors Dr Blanche Verlie is a climate justice expert at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney.  Professor Lauren Rickards is director of the Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT University and a lead author on the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

Yet again, regions across NSW and Queensland are coming face to face with “unprecedented” floods. 

We are seeing the far-reaching impacts of climate change, as documented and projected by this week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, playing out in real time in our communities.

Floods, like other extreme weather events fuelled by climate change, have long-term, wide-ranging impacts.

As we are seeing in Lismore, Brisbane and beyond, these events take out critical infrastructure, such as roads, buildings and power lines. This can take decades to rebuild, if we ever get there.

Horrifically, as we are seeing in these unspeakable events, people die. People lose their loved ones. Others lose their homes or their pets. The environment gets slammed. All kinds of inequality magnify these effects, and these effects in turn magnify inequalities. This is why climate change is known as a “threat multiplier”.

We know this. What we often fail to recognise is that all of these impacts intersect with each other, making them all worse. In the months after such spectacular disasters, people who are left homeless and/or without a livelihood often suffer acute and long-term physical and mental ill-health.

Communities and the networks of supportive relationships they provide can be torn apart as people move away, leaving those who remain more isolated and vulnerable to experiencing the post-traumatic stress that often lives in the wake of such disasters. But all “recovery” efforts – whether rebuilding physical infrastructure, or rebuilding community – require healthy people.

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These floods can no longer be accurately described as a “one in 1000-year” event, as suggested by NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet.

It is just five years since Lismore’s last catastrophic flooding event, and just a decade since Brisbane’s notorious 2011 floods.

But neither are they “the new normal”, given the escalating changes. In our intensifying climate, heroic ideals of “rebuilding” and “recovery” will not always be possible.

Not only do the varied impacts of individual extreme weather events interact with each other, they compound upon legacies of loss, trauma, disruption and incapacitation that have come (not that long) before.

Many people affected by the current floods have also suffered through recent climate-related extreme events, including previous floods, storms, heatwaves and the Black Summer fires. Because they are still dealing with the lingering effects of these other manifestations of a changing climate, including serious financial costs, this means the current floods are even more consequential for them.

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By making people worse off, climate-change related disasters are exacerbating the damage inflicted by further climate events, making people even more vulnerable to what lies ahead.

The social, economic and environmental impacts of the floods are thus a manifestation of climate change in more ways than one.

Not only is climate change making floods in eastern Australia more extreme in meteorological terms, but it is making people and society more vulnerable to their negative effects.

But the impacts of climate change are not inevitable or “natural”.

The social aspect of climate change impacts gives us more options for reducing them. Because impacts emerge out of specific, local, dynamic social situations, we can intervene in those situations to avoid or lessen them.

This is what adaptation is about. It involves not only reducing flood hazards (for example, through land use planning and stormwater management), but also ensuring people are as prepared and well placed to cope as possible.

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We can prepare for extreme weather events like this – and we must. Andrew Gissing

The mega risk climate change poses is that impacts outpace our adaptation, undermining our mitigation in the process.

The IPCC assessment (which one of us helped write) concludes that two of the most serious threats to Australia are cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts of such disasters, and that our institutions fail to adapt fast enough.

More broadly, it flags the risk of worsening vulnerability and, in turn, social inequalities.

The current floods underline what is at stake. Adaptation has to get ahead of the curve.

This challenge – dealing with proliferating impacts today while adapting to prevent and reduce impacts tomorrow – is partly why the report concludes that the window of opportunity to act is closing.

Mitigating greenhouse gases and systematically reducing the risk of climate change impacts requires people to be well, housed, resourced and functioning.

This window will open and close for us according to what we are dealing with.

So while those caught up in the current floods manage their cascading effects, the rest of us need to get to work in our various professions, organisations and communities to progress mitigation and adaptation, from the national scale down.

Links

• We can prepare for extreme weather events like this – and we must
• Atlas of human suffering’: More drought, fire and flood, less snow and coral, UN report says
• (AU The Conversation) Like Rivers In The Sky: The Weather System Bringing Floods To Queensland Will Become More Likely Under Climate Change
• (AU The Conversation) Our Hospitals Are At Greater Risk Of Flooding As The Climate Changes. We Need Better Evacuation Plans.
• (Reuters) Killer Heatwaves And Floods: Climate Change Worsened 2021 Weather Extremes
• (UK The Guardian) How Bad Is Storm Eunice – And Is It A Result Of Climate Breakdown?
• (Yahoo News Australia) What Australia Looks Like In 2050: 'A Very Different World'