Introduction by Croakey: As the World Meteorological Organization’s latest State of the Global Climate report makes clear, we need to get much better at preparing for and responding to flooding and other extreme weather events.
This will require governments to work more respectfully and effectively with local communities, write Professor Kay Cook, Dr Adrienne Byrt and David Tennant, who report below on the aftermath of flooding in regional Victoria in 2022.
“Truly effective response and recovery does not just need to recognise place, it has to embrace, respect and empower community,” they say.
Kay Cook, Adrienne Byrt and David Tennant write:
Disasters caused by extreme weather are not new in Australia. Their frequency and impacts are, however, increasing and intensifying.
In recent weeks all eyes were on Cyclone Alfred, as it took a slow, meandering path off Australia’s east coast, eventually making landfall near Brisbane. That the consequent destruction was less than what had been anticipated will be little comfort to the individuals, households, businesses, towns and regions who experienced and are now left to clean up the damage.
Many have done this before. Some, like residents in the northern NSW city of Lismore, have been through the emergency response and recovery cycle multiple times since 2020.
Community is a common theme in conversations about what supports effective response and recovery. A key ingredient in being able to absorb and rebound is sharing the anxiety, dangers and challenges associated with rebuilding with others who were also in harm’s way.
Resilience in isolation is much harder than when it is shared, where acts of support across multiple community levels can foster connection.
It might look like a neighbour offering to help with children or pets in the scramble to evacuate. Council administrative staff may show up at night and on weekends to make sure people in response centres are welcomed and provided somewhere dry to sleep. Engaging people to distribute grocery vouchers who know which is the closest supermarket – not one 100 kilometres away (still cut off by floodwater).
This sense of connection is the essence of community.
Most disaster and recovery planning recognises the importance of place. Nothing annoys locals who have experienced significant disaster more than experts from a long way away, telling them how they should react and what they should do.
That is a natural human reaction, but it is practical as well as emotional. Unless you have direct personal experience of local conditions, how can you really understand what happened and what you most need to recover and reduce the risk it will happen again?
Truly effective response and recovery does not just need to recognise place, it has to embrace, respect and empower community.
Recovery in Shepparton
The Goulburn Valley region of Victoria is no stranger to disasters fuelled by climate change.
According to a May 2022 Climate Council report, the Victorian regional city of Shepparton is amongst the least insurable parts of Australia, with predictions 90 percent of properties in the community will be uninsurable by 2030.
Less than six months after that report was released, Shepparton was severely impacted by a major flood event.
Around 7,000 properties were impacted, with 1,250 houses significantly damaged and 155 totally destroyed. Disruption and displacement were widespread.
Collective action
Two and a half years on, the community is still recovering.
While large-scale, external crisis response organisations were mobilised to support residents who required ‘light touch’ assistance with immediate needs, other residents required more intensive support.
Here, a critical element of Shepparton’s local recovery journey was establishing the Goulburn Flood Recovery Service (GFRS). The GFRS was a collaborative effort that at its peak involved seven not-for-profit community agencies with a physical presence in the region delivering support locally and in-person to impacted people.
The evaluation of the GFRS partnership approach highlighted the benefits of local services with local knowledge taking the lead in recovery, particularly for impacted residents with existing vulnerabilities that complicated recovery.
The GFRS partnership evaluation also emphasised that while trust was a key ingredient in standing up a shared service platform, doing so had an immediate multiplier effect. Staff working in the GFRS felt empowered to engage, share and problem solve as a collective.
Less positive was how formal bureaucracy supported the establishment and operations for the shared model, most importantly the ability to combine speed and flexibility.
Government is familiar with contracting a single entity, to do a defined job, in a specific way, to a set timeline. It is less adept at accepting a proposal for a willing coalition to design the best path to reach an outcome as they go.
That is not to say there was any resistance to the GFRS approach, rather that policy guidance prioritising place is not enough on its own.
Governments need more and better tools for trusting people in impacted communities to understand local logistics, for providing resources quickly and monitoring in appropriately scaled and sensitive ways.
There is scope for ensuring connections are more timely, effective and hardwired into the National Climate Risk Assessment and Adaptation plan.
To be successful, government must understand that doing things with communities is not the same as doing things to communities.
The tools are needed now, because what used to be one-in-one-hundred-year events are occurring with terrifying regularity.
Author details
Professor Kay Cook and Dr Adrienne Byrt, from the School of Social Sciences at Swinburne University, were part of the team that evaluated the partnership approach of the Goulburn Flood Recovery Service.
David Tennant is the CEO of FamilyCare, a community agency with its base in Shepparton, that was the lead for the Goulburn Flood Recovery Service.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on extreme weather events
