In the wake of the one-year anniversary of the Queensland and Northern NSW floods, JDA Co’s James Davidson (pictured below) is calling for flood resilience regulations within the National Construction Code.
Davidson believes like-for-like replacement strategies utilised by insurance companies are no longer sustainable from an environmental point of view. According to Aviva, the average cost to repair a single flood-damaged three-bedroom home equates to 13.9 tonnes of carbon emissions, with basic resilience measures found to reduce carbon emissions by a total of 64 percent.
JDA Co. have assessed over 1,000 flood-impacted homes across Queensland under the Resilient Homes Fund (RHF) program in the last year. Approximately $135 million in reports have been filed by the practice for houses to be retrofitted or raised via the funding. Davidson says the need for resilient homes is crucial for the construction industry mitigating emissions totals.
“The elephant in the room is that with each flood event – now more frequent – we're throwing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of non-resilient materials from ruined homes to landfill, only to be putting the same materials back in again and again, until it floods next time,” he says.
“You can put all the energy efficient lights in your house, but it won’t make a difference when it comes to saving the planet if your home isn’t built resiliently to withstand natural disasters.”
Following the floods, approximately 75,000 tonnes of kerbside waste was removed from Brisbane streets, with the Northern Rivers and Hawkesbury regions of NSW racking up some 220,000 tonnes of flood waste, with 70,000 tonnes of household and building waste coming from Lismore alone.
“Although more research will assist in the coming years to clarify the carbon emissions and costs of landfills, what is indisputable is the environmental and financial costs when looking at waste from flood events,” Davidson says.
A former Director of Emergency Architects Australia, Davidson was previously involved in the creation of the Flood Resilient Homes Program and is a Lead Advisor to the Queensland Government’s $741m Resilient Homes Fund.
“We’ve seen many properties through our assessment work across Brisbane and Ipswich where plasterboard has been cut and replaced five times from five different flood events in the last 10 years,” Davison continues.
“These houses are worth about $600,000 and have been rebuilt five times over at a cost of at least $150,000 each time, since 2011. More money has been spent repairing these properties than they are actually worth in the past decade.”
Davidson believes retrofitting homes for flood resilience is a cost effective way to offset flood risks.
“Our own peer-reviewed modelling shows that for every dollar spent making your home more resilient, there is $6-8 return depending on the type of home and its location,” he says.
“I believe the 2022 event will be one of the last times people will be able to afford insurance. One of the best things we can do for climate change is to adapt our homes to the changing climate.”
