01/02/2022

(AU The Conversation) Our Hospitals Are At Greater Risk Of Flooding As The Climate Changes. We Need Better Evacuation Plans.

The Conversation -  |  | 

Rick Rycroft/AP
Authors
With hospitals under strain from COVID-19, we need to safeguard them against another threat set to increase as the world warms.

That threat? Flooding.

Many Australian hospitals were built on cheap land near rivers.

But as climate change loads the dice in favour of larger floods, areas previously safe may no longer be so.

We must plan ahead to ensure patients and healthcare workers are not trapped by floodwaters.

Our new research shows future floods in low-lying areas of Western Sydney are likely to disrupt road networks, preventing safe evacuation of patients. Only last year, this region suffered its worst floods in decades, and more are expected as we enter a flooding cycle. This fast-growing region is rated one of Australia’s highest flooding risks, and hosts a number of healthcare facilities built in flood-prone areas.

The solution? We believe new approaches to mathematical modelling can help decision makers optimise plans for safe evacuation in different flooding scenarios. By cutting evacuation time, we hope these approaches can save lives.

Hospitals were not built to cope with larger floods

Around 80% of Australians live within 50 kilometres of the coast. As a result, many hospitals were built on low-lying land adjacent to seas or rivers. Most were designed without climate change risks in mind.

The 2019 Townsville floods saw many roads cut off and cars stranded. Andrew Rankin/AAP

The major floods brought by La Nina last year, and the catastrophic 2010-2011 Queensland floods, have shown us how exposed many of our cities are to floods.

Already in 2022, we have seen large floods up and down the east coast. Climate change is predicted to bring Australia less rain overall, except for the tropical north. The rain that does fall will be more likely to fall in intense bursts. River flash floods from intense rain events or cyclones will pose an increasing threat to health facilities.

Some urban areas are on highly flood-prone areas. For example, the NSW Hawkesbury Nepean flood plan anticipates a flood similar to the infamous 1867 flood would result in around 90,000 people being evacuated.

That’s to say nothing of flooding from the sea. Around Australia, 75 hospitals and health service facilities are within 200 metres of the sea. That puts them at real risk from coastal inundation and erosion by the end of the century, if the seas rise by one metre as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. Hospitals have already been left without power for days due to flooding, while others have been forced to evacuate patients. Only last year, floods up and down the east coast cut roads and forced authorities to find alternatives to hospitals for people unable to get through.

Clearly, this matters. Hospitals play a vital role in creating a disaster-resilient society, and it is critical they can keep operating in disaster situations.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for a better understanding of the threat posed by flooding.

What can we do to prepare?

In our region, very little is known about how we might best evacuate hospitals in the event of a major flood. We simply haven’t done enough research.

What we found in our work is that the issue is extremely complex. Where would patients be evacuated to, for instance? How do you do it safely? Which routes would be safe in a major flood? How would medical staff get to other hospitals?

Evidence from recent floods suggests many hospitals in flooded areas will face major challenges transferring patients and resources to other healthcare facilities.

So what can hospitals do better?

At present, hospital administrators rely heavily on evacuation drills to test and improve emergency evacuation planning. These drills are expensive and disruptive and their effectiveness is difficult to assess.

We have found new approaches to mathematical modelling could greatly assist hospital managers plan for a flood to prevent them becoming disasters.

For example, analysis of Western Sydney’s Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley can visually show how different size flood events would impact on hospitals, healthcare and aged care facilities, as well as roads, bridges and electricity lines.

Modelling outcomes for a range of flooding scenarios in Western Sydney’s Hawksbury-Nepean valley. Author provided
Imagine the Hawksbury-Nepean Valley area floods again like last year.

In a scenario where a hospital floods and patients need evacuation, hospital administrators will face a conundrum. Which roads do they send the patients down?

Sophisticated modelling our team is undertaking will let us predict which routes are best, based on the roads most likely to flood, ambulance and staff availability, health needs of patients and the availability of suitable beds and staff in other hospitals. The models allow us to optimise routes for the most urgent patients.

For hospital administrators, the benefit of these models is the ability to glimpse the likeliest scenarios and plan ahead, before the floods happen.

Climate change can supercharge floods, as we are seeing more and more. Decision makers must plan ahead accordingly. Running flood and evacuation simulations now could help save lives in the future.

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How to Win More Global Warming Lawsuits

Bloomberg - Mark Buchanan

Plaintiffs who sue governments and companies over climate change would have a higher success rate if they relied on the most recent science.

A 2018 heat wave caused havoc in Northern Europe, including by hurting shipping on a water-depleted Rhine. Photographer: Maja Hitij/Getty Images


Author
Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer, is the author of the book "Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics."
The fight against global warming is rapidly moving into the courtrooms.

In the past few years, in landmark cases in the Netherlands, Germany and France, courts have agreed that state and corporate entities have a duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and demanded they adopt more aggressive policies.

A Dutch court, for example, ordered the government to reduce emissions to 25% below 1990s levels, forcing it to go beyond its proposed goal of 17%.

These rulings mark an encouraging shift. Over the decades, plaintiffs have brought — and lost — more than a thousand major cases accusing governments and private companies of causing specific damages through climate emissions.

One reason this dismal record may be changing is that plaintiffs are making more persuasive arguments. But they could be doing even better.

According to a recent a study of arguments put forth in 73 recent or ongoing cases, plaintiffs are generally failing to use the up-to-date science capable of linking climate emissions to direct harmful consequences.

“Attribution” — the term scientists use to describe the evidence linking human behavior to global warming — isn’t as easy as it might seem.

Proving that some flood or storm damage is due to climate change, and not just a freak event of normal weather, means showing that such an event would have been much more unlikely in a world in which climate change wasn't happening.

To do that, scientists have to rely on good statistical understanding of the normal climate system and weather — if warming weren’t happening — and make a clear distinction from what is actually happening now.

Collecting that historical data and building those scientific models has been difficult. But researchers have persisted. In 2018, a summer heat wave in northern Europe brought average temperatures more than 5°C higher (9°F) than the recent historical norm.

Detailed studies of this event based on available data and atmospheric modeling eventually concluded that such an event was roughly 100 times more likely than it would have been in the absence of climate change.

In a realistic statistical sense, climate change caused it, as well as the damage following from it, which included many hundreds of excess deaths caused by extreme temperatures in Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

The science for making such causal links has matured in the past decade due to concerted efforts of groups such as the World Weather Attribution organization, created by scientists who have developed exhaustive methods for determining which events are and aren’t good candidates for realistic attribution.

It’s unfortunate that, so far, the activists bringing climate cases don’t seem to be keeping up with the science.

In their study of recent cases, for example, Rupert Stuart-Smith of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and colleagues found that plaintiffs in nearly 75% of the cases — typically relating to damages from extreme temperatures or sea-level rise — made no effort to demonstrate a clear causal link between the damage they experienced and defendants’ emissions.

Instead, plaintiffs mostly hoped it would be enough if the court accepted the existence of a general link between climate emissions and increased risks for extreme events.

The better alternative, these researchers argue, would be to present specific evidence to link particular damages at one time and place to defendants’ actions. That may seem inherently difficult, as emissions come from so many sources, but attribution has developed statistical techniques to reliably estimate the portion of damage attributable to individual emitters.

And such arguments are in spirit no different from arguments courts have long accepted in other areas – for example, in cases determining partial liability for health consequences from tobacco smoke or asbestos.

Such estimates see Exxon Mobil and Chevron as each having contributed more than 2% to the cumulative acidification of the oceans, with coal and cement producers in China accounting for more than 10%.

More specific arguments could make a big difference. A decade ago, a courts that rejected climate-related lawsuits suggested that legitimate links could never be made between defendants’ emissions and plaintiffs’ injuries.

That view was premature. The science has decisively moved on. Now, in many cases, such links can be made with high confidence.

It's not surprising, perhaps, that legal experts haven't kept up with latest science, which is getting stronger all the time.

If activists and their legal teams begin employing better science, the legal battles could soon start tipping the other way, in which case courts might drive real change on emissions policies.

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Decarbonising The Economy Could Lead To Hundreds Of Thousands Of Job Losses, So What Can Be Done?

ABC News - Jess Davis

New modelling predicts the impact on jobs if Australia's trading partners decarbonise. (ABC News: Jess Davis)

Key Points
  • A report outlines the impact of likely 2050 decarbonisation commitments by Australia's export partners
  • It finds job losses are likely to be concentrated in regional areas
  • There are calls for more coordinated policies from all levels of government to plan for a "predictable change"
As the world slowly starts to move away from fossil fuels, Australia's lucrative export markets are predicted to undergo a massive shift.

As the shift occurs, new research predicts up to 300,000 jobs could be lost over the coming decades in mining and other related industries, such as services — with most losses hitting regional areas.

The report by independent think tank the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) mapped out how many jobs could be lost and where, if our trading partners follow through on plans to decarbonise by 2050.

"We've got to understand that the demand for that product [fossil fuel exports] is not going to be anything like what it is today, that's going to be a much smaller industry, it's going to support … fewer jobs," CPD's policy director Toby Phillips said.
"To deny the reality of what the global market is doing is to set ourselves up for failure," he said.
It's a reality that coal miner Grant Howard is well aware of. He has been in the industry for 40 years, the last 20 of those in central Queensland's Bowen Basin.

Grant Howard says tough conversations about declining jobs in the fossil fuel sector are needed. (ABC News: Angel Parsons)

"I've had a great run and I want the same as what I've had, I want that for future generations," he said.
"The only way to do that is for us, as an industry, as a country, as a community is to change and adapt to the future."
Planning for a 'predictable and manageable change'

The Bowen Basin is heavily reliant on coal exports, both metallurgical coal for steel and to a lesser extent thermal coal.

Mr Phillips said those exports left the region vulnerable, with the report finding the Bowen Basin and the Hunter in NSW were likely to be the most heavily impacted.

"These affected jobs are highly concentrated in around half a dozen local government areas," he said.

The report calls on all levels of government to plan ahead for what Mr Phillips described as a "predictable and manageable" change.

The report modelled the impact on Australian output and employment at a local government level.(Supplied: the Centre for Policy Development)

"The transition challenge over the next 30 years is not so much about dealing with a major shock to the entire Australian economy," he said.
"It's actually looking at these concentrated effects in specific areas, and saying, 'How do we diversify these specific economies?'."
'Scary numbers don't help'

In the heart of the Hunter, Singleton Chamber of Commerce president Sue Gilroy said frightening headline figures were not helpful.

"I just think it scares people," she said.

"They want to put their head back in the sand … because 300,000 jobs is a lot of jobs."

Ms Gilroy, who has worked in the coal industry in the past, said she was realistic about its future.

Sue Gilroy says coal will be around for a while yet, but there still need to be plans for diversifying. (Supplied)

"It'll be a lot of years yet and we know coal is a big part of what we do here in the Hunter and fossil fuel is a big part of what we do," she said.
"But let's get real about this. Let's look at what it looks like to diversify, and grow the industries we have here that don't work with coal."
New investment, jobs

Warrick Jordan from the Hunter Jobs Alliance said work was already being done on the ground.

"To be honest, these types of dire predictions aren't very helpful. The sky isn't falling in, but there are real issues that we need to address," he said.

"There's a lot of good, smart people who are working on attracting new investment and growing jobs."

Mr Jordan has called for a locally run coordinating body — that would oversee a decarbonisation of the economy — otherwise known as a transition authority.
"Looking at the evidence from Australia and overseas, it's really clear that you need a regionally driven model that puts regional people in in the box seat," he said.
"The best models we see [are] where you have a state government that creates the framework, creates the authority and puts resources in, and then you have an Australian or a Commonwealth level of support that can provide resourcing in the right policy environment."

Queensland's Bowen Basin is heavily dependent on coal exports for both steel and energy. (ABC News: Jess Davis)

For Mr Howard, reports like this one are important. "I think these reports are good because they help to maintain the conversation, they start to wrap some numbers around ideas, and the consequences of not making these adjustments," he said.
"Politicians need to do their job, they need to give coal miners specifically good information so that we as a group, as individuals, can make adjustments to our life in plan."
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