ANU 2025 Disaster Solutions Update

I participated last week in the 2025 Disaster Solutions Update, hosted by the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions and its partners ANU Institute for Water Futures and UNICEF Australia.

If you missed the event, you can catch up on Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gib7nV_Y 

My presentation covered:

1. The role of economic assessment and the complexities
   • Regular complexities with standard benefit cost analysis
     Discount rates, valuation, intangibles, risk
   • Additional complexities in assessment of Nature-based Solutions for flood mitigation
     Climate scenarios increases information and computational demands exponentially
     Significant intangible benefits related to environmental outcomes
     Many human costs and benefits need to be exposed to a change in a biophysical indicator – increases uncertainties (spreads the probability distribution)
     Temporal problems are more complicated due to:
         long-lived and back-loaded benefits
         intergenerational considerations
   • The search for perfection is wasteful and futile
2. What to do about the complexities?
   • Multidisciplinary analysis
     Incredibly rewarding to work in multi-disciplinary teams - fosters innovation
     Hydrological and biophysical modelling underpins all the economics
     Innovation no accident: Bremer catchment assessment
   • Structured approach
     Roles and responsibilities – economics is ‘one lens’ (albeit an important one)
     Tangible (readily measurable) benefits and costs should form the basis of the economic assessment
     Ideal to be able to show tangible benefits > tangible costs
     Describe the co-benefits and measure them if practical - DO NOT ADD THEM!
     Comply with prescribed government methodologies
     Describe the models, methods, data and assumptions - DO NOT HIDE THEM!
     The Net Present Value is ONLY a statistic!
3. The political economy of preventing flooding disasters
   • Reactionary focus
     Prevention is under-funded relative to recovery
     Flip-side is that when a disaster occurs, all resources are pushed at the problem
     Always dealing with the symptoms, not the cause
   • Remain encumbered with a 19th century colonial / frontier conquering / development obsessed mindset
     Compelled to tame nature
     Riverine systems have been turned into drains which exacerbate the flooding
     Irrigated agriculture established to harness the wastewater running down our drains
     Our whole policy approach and economic system is resistant to Nature-based Solutions
   • Dealing with fundamental asymmetric information problems
     Planners under extreme pressure to allow building in floodplains
         Need to solve the housing problem – cheap land in floodplains is very attractive
         Owners of peri-urban floodplain land have too much say over development
     Need to review planning; building on floodplains is simply crazy!