Antinuclear

Tasmania needs to be better prepared for climate change and weather extremes

 Learn fast or pay the cost, EDITORIAL, Mercury January 6, 2017 BEYOND the near-universal consensus that climate change is a reality that humans will increasingly have to adapt to, there is a growing realisation that a warming planet will see an increase in the frequency and intensity of weather-related natural disasters.

This is not a revelation for those who are on the frontline of dealing with disaster. The state’s second Natural Disaster Risk Assessment released in September listed bushfires and flooding as the greatest risks to the state. Not far down the list were heatwave and coastal inundation. The available evidence strongly suggests that the likelihood, frequency and severity of these events will increase as climate change becomes more pronounced.

Tasmania is no stranger to the impact of natural disaster. If the ferocity of the bushfires of 1967 are too distant a memory, we need only to think back to the devastation wrought on the Tasman Peninsula in 2013 or the fires which ravaged the state’s wilderness areas at the beginning of last year. Fresh in our memories too are last year’s floods and the terrible toll they took in terms of human life, property damage and economic disruption……..

Just across the Tasman, New Zealand’s superb civil defence preparedness for earthquakes and tsunamis might provide a useful template to improve our own.

Alongside the need to harden our infrastructure (burying critical power, phone and data wires might help for bushfire-price areas for example) getting better at dealing with disasters should become part of our DNA. We need to better integrate charities into the official response. We need to ensure our agencies are sufficiently equipped and trained and we need to make sure residents have the resources they need to be able to cope with disruption to power, water and road infrastructure. And we need to improve responses disasters over the long term — it is not good enough that the effect of last year’s floods are still being keenly felt by some on the land.

The findings of the current inquiry must be heeded. Tasmania simply cannot afford to continue to learn the same lessons time and time again.http://www.themercury.com.au/news/opinion/editorial-learn-fast-or-pay-the-cost/news-story/c88138b52b0dd6087da5066186d87621

January 9, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News