Dr Luke Robinson presents a different view on dealing with the impact of flood in our region after seeing the 15 engineering ideas presented at the CSIRO community sessions. In the interests of including many views about flood mitigation, IndyNR.com publishes his opinion piece below.
Our communities need sustainable solutions to minimise flood impacts
Recently I attended the community consultation forums run by NEMA/CSIRO on the newly released Richmond catchment flood model.
Like many others, I am deeply appreciative of the hard work and expertise Jai Vaze and his CSIRO team have put into developing this complex model.
People have expressed their disappointed however that all 15 mitigation options put forward for modelling were hard engineering measures with no nature-based solutions included.
They also said it was unrealistic to expect community members to rank their preferred mitigation options given they were so vaguely defined and with no information on their likely considerable economic, environmental, social or cultural costs.
These factors need to be made explicit at each stage of the process, though this would appear to be the job of NEMA rather than the CSIRO with its more technical remit.
Jai and his team worked hard to repeatedly answer often the same questions to different people throughout the day. Ideally, these could have been more efficiently addressed by a series of initial formal presentations, followed by moderated questions from the floor, then later informal one-on-one discussions where more nuance or detail was required.
An important part of a community consultation process is for people to hear and learn from each other, not just the experts.
I was fortunately able to attend Woodburn and Lismore forums, gaining insights from the broader community beyond Lismore also affected by proposed mitigation measures. Clearly local knowledge and the effects of major flooding on different areas of a catchment are part of the bigger picture for informed decision making.
Going forward, it is important to remember that mitigation measures are not the only way to deal with the impacts of flooding.
Indeed, in many places it may be that the only guaranteed way to keep people safe is to get them off the floodplains.
Done once and properly, this is likely to be cheaper in the long term than dealing with repeated disasters, or the cost of building, providing compensation for and maintaining massive hard engineering projects which cannot be guaranteed to work, especially given the vagaries of nature and a changing climate.
Our communities look forward to ongoing deep and respectful engagement with the CSIRO, NEMA and all levels of government as we work towards long-term, sustainable solutions that truly protect us and our precious natural home.
Dr Luke Robinson
Resident of upper Richmond catchment and recent Greens candidate for Page