Building Walls Around Flood Problems: The Place of Levees in Australian Flood Management

Abstract

Recent Australian floods have resulted in many changes to levee provisions in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. It is therefore timely to review levee issues and current state arrangements. This paper investigates the use of levees as an adaptation measure to address climate change. It also looks at the performance and reliability of Australian levees, environmental impacts, and the relationship between levees and the development of flood prone land. Despite recent changes, there continues to be much scope for improving floodplain development planning and the assessment and management of levees. Development controls continue to be inadequate and this will fuel future demand for levee protection, while lack of development controls behind levees is likely to lead to greater consequences when levees fail, a scenario more likely due to loss of climate stationarity. While levees provide incremental adaptation, they do not offer a long-term solution. However, transformational adaptation measures used in many places overseas are poorly supported by Australian funding programs. Long-term adjustments need to be planned and funded and appropriate incentives and decision-making structures need to be put in place.

Key Words:

• Adaptation
• climate change
• floodplain management
• flood mitigation
• flood policy
• levees

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C Wenger

Caroline Wenger has an honours degree in prehistory (the Australian National University) and a diploma of horticulture (Canberra Institute of Technology). She is currently working towards a PhD at the Australian National University in the areas of climate change adaptation and managing future flood threats. In the past Caroline has worked for both government and charity in the natural resource sector, including the Commonwealth Department of Primary Industries and Energy, the National Water Commission and the World Wide Fund for Nature. She joined the Australian National University in 2012 as lead researcher for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility’s (NCCARF) project titled “Living with floods: key lessons from Australia and abroad”. She also contributed a floods case study to NCCARF’s Statutory frameworks, institutions and policy processes for climate adaptation report. Caroline is continuing to research flood policy and governance, including decision-making processes, the potential for policy transfer between countries, the role of insurance, the use of specific measures such as relocation and the efficacy of resilience strategies. In her spare time Caroline has been a Landcare volunteer for over 20 years and is currently convener of the Umbagong Landcare Group which operates along Ginninderra Creek. She received the ACT Individual Landcarer’s Award in 2013.