I see lots of people talking as if things are going to miraculously reset back to normal after 31st December 2020. It won’t. The overall trend is to things progressively getting worse with fewer and fewer good years in between.
UN Secretary General said in his State of the Planet speech
“To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken.
Dear friends,
Humanity is waging war on nature.
This is suicidal.
Nature always strikes back -- and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”
So despite this and other reports from BOM, The Lancet, FAO and climate academics, governments at all levels in Australia are just doing business as usual.
It can’t be just business as usual.
Locally what we will see is after each natural disaster occurs council will have less and less money to rebuild infrastructure. As each natural disaster occurs more and more people will be uninsured or underinsured and have trouble building back to what have to be higher building standards. With less housing rents increase, putting further housing stress on our low income community members. Each drought brings higher prices putting more people into food poverty. Each heatwave more and more people have to decide whether they can afford to put an air conditioner on or not.
Each time the pressure to rebuild quickly means corners get cut. In the Cobargo clean up they were struggling to get the asbestos separated properly let alone recycle properly so our landfill was unnecessarily filled up.
Because of shortages of time and money, mental space pressures, and pressure from the loudest voices things get built back the way they were, but cheaper.
So you end up with a negative spiral downwards.
The sensible thing would be to have a plan in advance to build back better (or not build back if a planned retreat is the most sensible thing). Have a plan and stick to it.
The intelligent thing would be to start planning and building now for what we know are the planning regulations and infrastructure needed for the changing climate and low carbon future for the next fifty years. Bega Valley Council has started this with its plan to turn village halls into heat wave shelters.
What the council is not doing well is bringing the community along with it. If the community hasn’t thought in advance about the issues of climate change and what it means locally, hasn’t thought about what building back better might look like, hasn’t thought about what would be needed in a low carbon future then they certainly cannot do so after a natural disaster like Black Summer when they are traumatised and lacking basic necessities like shelter, water and food.
We have to do it in advance, which means we have to start talking now.
Now I know councillors don’t like community meetings because only the aggrieved come and it is all negative . The people who are happy don’t come to the meetings. But what if we had community workshops, with trained facilitators where people could work in groups to identify the things they most valued, to bring their positive ideas about how the future should look, thought creatively about how to deal with the constraint of money and felt invested in the hard choices that have to be made.
We have so much talent and skills in the valley we could find creative solutions. But we have to start NOW and we have to stop the pretence that it is business as usual.
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