After a disaster, there are significant opportunities to enhance resilience by building back in a way that best adapts to natural hazard risk. Using best adaptive practice can enhance resilience to natural hazards, however these hazard mitigation techniques can also perpetuate a community’s vulnerability. This can be improved through pre-disaster planning, simplified governmental processes and an understanding that climate change is making resilience harder.
In a webinar hosted by Natural Hazards Research Australia on 14 February, Prof Gavin Smith of North Carolina State University presented key challenges, insights and lessons from his hands-on experience and research with hazard mitigation strategies in the United States and New Zealand.
As a leading expert globally, Prof Smith unpacked the main issues and challenges with house buyouts, rebuilds and elevations for more than 220 attendees at the webinar.
“Building back houses to their previous outdated standards perpetuates vulnerability,” Prof Smith said.
In opening the webinar, Natural Hazards Research Australia CEO Andrew Gissing noted that while measures to reduce damages such as retrofitting, house raising and buyouts were not new, the scale and frequency of their adoption was increasing both in Australia and internationally.
“In a warming climate, the pressure to adopt such measures is likely to increase as extreme weather events worsen, placing greater pressures on communities.”
“We have an opportunity to evaluate the implementation of resilience programs here and overseas to best apply investments to Australian community needs.’’
What are buyouts/buybacks and elevations?
Buybacks or voluntary purchase schemes are government-funded programs that work with communities to purchase homes in areas that are or could be affected by disasters, usually followed by rebuilding homes in a safer area. The US’s buyout programs are voluntary and provide homeowners with the pre-disaster market value for their homes, often prioritising low-income, more vulnerable communities. Once a home is bought back, the land must then be maintained as public open land (e.g. parks).
“It’s one of the most effective risk reduction techniques. In the US, over 65,000 homes have been acquired since the 1990s,” Prof Smith said.
House raising programs or elevations are also utilised to raise the habitable floor space of a dwelling above frequent flooding, in line with local floodplain management standards.
A recent example of these mitigation techniques being used in Australia is the Queensland Reconstruction Authority’s Resilient Homes Fund, established in May 2022, which encourages homeowners to either retrofit, home-raise or voluntary buyback. This program is being rolled out in towns such as Ipswich, where more than 60 homeowners accepted offers to buy back after the 2022 floods.
What are the key challenges?
Prof Smith highlighted that the US’s buyout funding programs are highly complex, bureaucratic and rigid, often being micromanaged by federal or state governments without much local government involvement. Communities have difficulty navigating the programs, where success is impacted by a lack of government flexibility.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is that local state and federal capacity and commitment can be lacking,” he said.
It is also common practice in the US that buyout funding is initiated after a disaster – a lengthy and stressful process for community members who are busy recovering, which hampers public participation. More effective pre-planning investment would ensure that communities can relocate either before or very shortly after a disaster.
“We are still not adequately planning for these issues, nor are we building the capacity needed to assist local government to engage in these complex programs,” Prof Smith said.
He also touched on community members’ place attachment when relocating or buying out homes where people don’t want to leave, and the challenge of sensitively navigating this within government bureaucracy.
“Moving from your community to a new location is very unsettling,” he said. “People often come back to their original communities at the anniversary of the storm to reconnect, which tells you something about the social bonds that are torn apart by buyouts. We don’t spend enough time linking land-use planning to public health and psychology wellbeing of individuals.”
Prof Smith discussed other challenges with buyouts, including utilisation of land after buyouts, rebuilding affordability, uneven levels of participation, length of time to implement, lack of global lesson-sharing and loss of local tax base. To improve the thoughtful use of open spaces left behind once homes are bought, Prof Smith has co-authored a new Open Space Management Guide for better planning.
Prof Smith’s three key pieces of advice provide a pathway for Australia to improve buyback and retrofitting programs:
- Do a good job of pre-event planning: invest the time it takes to build community relationships, engender trust and think through the buyout process as a continuum – thinking about what you do with the open space, how do you resettle thoughtfully.
- Think about the capacity of national entities to build capacity for governments to undertake these issues.
- Think about how buyouts and elevation should be nested within an overall strategy that considers climate change.
“Take communities forward while considering not only the risks of tomorrow, but also the future,” he said.
You can watch the webinar recording by clicking the Call to Action at the top right of this page.