Macquarie University

Who is to blame for the recent floods: Man or Nature?

This month’s disastrous flooding in both Brazil and Australia is yet another reminder of the destructive power of nature.

Globally the costs of natural disasters are increasing rapidly, fuelled by societal changes such as increases in population, wealth and inflation, not climate change. Across different natural hazards and jurisdictions, some 22 separate peer-reviewed studies of weather-related natural disaster events now attest to this fact, say Macquarie University's John McAneney and Kevin Roche.

McAneney and Roche work for Risk Frontiers, an independent research centre at Macquarie University which is devoted to the understanding and pricing of catastrophe risks for the insurance and emergency management sectors. John McAneney is the Director of the Centre while Kevin Roche is a PhD candidate. Recently Roche’s paper on Policy Options for Managing Flood Insurance was published in the journal Environmental Hazards.

Roche and McAneney say the problem is that we now have more people living in vulnerable areas, with more to lose. The footprint of the current Brisbane flooding is very similar to the 1974 flood, but the value of assets and the population at risk has increased enormously in the intervening years.

There are those who will lay the blame on global climate change, though such comments are a distraction and do not acknowledge the accumulated and rapidly growing risk that exists in the absence of any change in climate, they say.

An area larger than France and Germany combined was flooded in Queensland earlier this month

This is not to deny that climate change is a real concern, say Roche and McAneney. The latest research, however, just published in the international journal Environmental Research Letters by Risk Frontiers Ryan Crompton and McAneney together with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Roger Pielke Jr. suggests that it may be centuries until we can be confident that climate change is influencing disaster losses. A further article on their research was published in the New York Times earlier this year.

Roche and McAneney say if we truly wish to reduce the scale of future disasters in Australia, we need risk-informed land planning policies with risks appropriately priced by an active insurance market. In simple terms, for flood and bushfire, this means an end to unmanaged development of flood plains or within bushlands. 

Read more about the work of the Risk Frontiersresearch centre.