Land values need to change due to climate risk

Avoca resident Ian Carruthers says land values will need to change in response to increasing climate risks.

He says individuals need all information about risks when looking to buy a house, such as flood, bushfire, landslip – and the risk of coastal inundation.

Carruthers was speaking at the Gosford public hearing of the Parliamentary Inquiry into the NSW planning systems and the impacts of climate change on the environment and communities.

Committee chair Sue Higginson asked if a Section 10.7 or the old Section 149 Certificate that would go with each real estate transaction was good enough.

The certificate explains controls, requirements and restrictions that could impact how a property is used.

Carruthers explained that there was a backlash when the State Government attempted to add a requirement for coastal inundation risk to be added to the certificate.

“People living on the foreshore did not want that information to be displayed,” he said.

“It’s okay for other risks, but not for coastal risk; why?

“Because it affected their property values, they said, and it caused their insurance premiums to go up,” Carruthers said.

“Why their insurance premiums went up, I’m not entirely sure, because if you look at your home insurance policy, you’ll find in the general exclusion section that certain things are generally excluded as a blanket: nuclear events, war and coastal inundation.”

Carruthers has a wealth of climate experience, not only locally as a member of Central Coast Council’s Catchments to Coast advisory committee but also in his career as a senior adviser to the Federal Government focusing on environmental and natural resources issues, and the linkages between science and policy.

He led Australia’s involvement in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in framing successive Council Of Australian Governments (COAG) commonwealth and state climate change strategies.

He retired in 2010.

Carruthers mentioned Wamberal Beach as an area with “legacy assets” in place.

“We have built an enormous legacy problem that is going to have to be managed, and governments certainly cannot compensate their way through this,” he said.

“The treasuries aren’t big enough to do this.

“What it means is asset values will need to change in response to risk.

“We are seeing that happening in relation to flood.

“If you look at a city like Lismore, once the scale of the risk problem becomes sufficiently great and urgent, you see asset values resetting.

“What we need to do here is have a slow and steady reappraisal of asset values in response to understood risks.

“This is a national transition process, not something that becomes confronted as an unholy mess that is enormously expensive.”

Carruthers talked about the need to distinguish legacy problems of existing assets and the opportunities for choices in new development.

He said it was important for governments to develop and engage in a community consultation process – to ask the question: “What sort of future are we trying to achieve over the next 50 years or so?”

“In the case of the Coast, what do we want on our open, sandy beaches, given that these beaches, left to the impacts of increasing sea levels and greater ocean storm activity, are going to recede?” he said.

“Those beaches will recede – the geophysics of that are absolutely well understood.

“What are you going to do about that, when houses on the dunes are being undercut?

“Do we build seawalls?

“Where do we end up with that?

“Are we going to have complete armament of Australia’s beaches, like we have at Bondi and so on?

““Is this what we want for the future of the Coast, or do we want to allow the natural process?

“Of course, once you start putting in hard armouring on beaches, then you have sand being stripped away because you have changed the whole energy behaviour of the sea and the sand.”

Carruthers said people valued their beaches for recreation.

“Australians love going to the beach,” he said.

“What are we going to protect?

“Are we going to protect the future for the beachgoers?

“Are we going to protect the homes with armoured walls?

“There is no simple answer to this.

“You just have to lay out the conundrum and frame a strategy accordingly.”

He didn’t believe there would be one single approach.

“In some places there will be seawalls, in other places it will be appropriate to just let nature take its course and there will have to be retreat,” he said.

“It ought to be on the table up-front as to what future we want in this situation.”

Inquiry member Mark Buttigieg asked his view on the proposed Wamberal seawall.

Carruthers said he had taken a neutral position as he had been part of Council’s consultations on that.

“I have felt it more helpful to provide advice,” he said.

“For example, I advanced the proposition that if you are going to build a seawall, then when you make that decision you had better have a sand nourishment strategy in place.”

That included the logistical realities of delivering sand to the beach and who was going to pay.

“Maybe the sand nourishment issue is a showstopper in terms of whether you should have a seawall,” he said.

He thought it was encouraging that State Parliament recently revised the offshore minerals legislation to differentiate sand mining as a mineral resource versus restoring sand to the beach.

“That seemed to me to be a very necessary and sensible option to bring to the table because, as I said, I don’t know in the Wamberal case what should happen,” he said.

“Plus, past planning decisions and continuing capitalisation on that dune really was the wrong way to go, but we’re where we are and so what do you do about that?

“But it does come down to a matter of social equity, doesn’t it?

“What are the rights of 60 householders who have now vastly over-capitalised those blocks because they’re prime sea locations versus the beachgoers who are really concerned about the future of their beach, the surf and so on?

“It’s a wicked problem.”

Merilyn Vale