This year on WSP's People and Place Podcast, we are introducing a miniseries titled Planning for Natural Hazards, and Dr. Mark Maund, WSP's Planning and Approvals Team Lead for Regional New South Wales and ACT, will be hosting it. Join Mark as he speaks with some brilliant specialists from around Australia who will contribute to the conversation around planning for natural hazards and a better future. In our second episode Dr. Rodney van der Ree, Technical Executive – Ecology, joins to share his knowledge and experience as an ecology specialist. Rodney and Mark discuss the impact of natural hazards on biodiversity and how it is becoming more challenging for flora and fauna in Australia. They also talk about how ecology can help reduce the impact of these natural hazards.
This year on WSP's People and Place Podcast, we are introducing a miniseries titled Planning for Natural Hazards, and Dr. Mark Maund, WSP's Planning and Approvals Team Lead for Regional New South Wales and ACT, will be hosting it. Join Mark as he speaks with some brilliant specialists from around Australia who will contribute to the conversation around planning for natural hazards and a better future. In our second episode Dr. Rodney van der Ree, Technical Executive – Ecology, joins to share his knowledge and experience as an ecology specialist. Rodney and Mark discuss the impact of natural hazards on biodiversity and how it is becoming more challenging for flora and fauna in Australia. They also talk about how ecology can help reduce the impact of these natural hazards.
Hi everyone, and welcome to the People and Place podcast by WSP. My name is Dr. Mark Maund and I'm WSPs Planning and Approvals team lead for regional New South Wales, and ACT. This year on the People and Place podcast, we are introducing a mini series titled Planning for Natural Hazards. I'll be speaking with some brilliant specialists around Australia, who can contribute to the conversation around planning for natural hazards and a better future. Before we begin, I would like to do an Acknowledgement of Country. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands, where our projects take place throughout Australia and their continuing connection to culture, community, land, sea, and sky, we pay our respect to elders past, present, and future. Today I'm joined by Rodney Van der Ree. He's a technical executive in Ecology at WSP. I'm really excited to talk to Rodney and get his insight into ecology and natural hazards.
RODNEY:Sure Mark it's great to be here. So I, am, as you said, the Technical Executive in Ecology at WSP, which is a national role working across Australia on ecological issues for WSP. Prior to that, I've worked in local government and also spent close to 20 years doing research at university.
MARK:And I understand you have a PhD, what was the research in?
RODNEY:Uh, yes, so it's Dr. Rodney Van der Ree, by the way, Mark, but you can just call me Rod. The PhD I was investigating, I was interested in connectivity and the movement of wildlife across the landscape. So I was interested in studying corridors of vegetation and how different animals lived in them, and I spent probably five or six years chasing possums and gliders around these linear strips of woodland, uh, in central Victoria. So lots of radio tracking, trapping, spotlighting, and not a lot of sleep.
MARK:It's great to have you here. As you know ecology is a key component of the environment and its significant impact in terms of where we live and work. Uh, ecologically sustainable development is a key part of the legislation that we deal with environmental management. And I know the biodiversity is also a key component of that. Biodiversity and threatened species and protection of native vegetation is really important in terms of our lifestyle. I was wondering if you'd give me a bit of background or some thoughts on the importance of biodiversity.
RODNEY:That's the thing about biodiversity is, it is, fundamentally what sustains us and sustains society. And if we don't have a biodiversity, then you know, the planet will start to fall apart. There's a really good analogy, I don't remember who, suggested this, but if you can imagine the earth as an airplane and biodiversity are the rivets that hold the plane together, you can lose a few rivets, one rivet at a time, a few rivets here, a few there, and the plane will still fly. But at some point, you lose too many rivets and the plane will crash. And, I think that's a really good way of describing the role that biodiversity plays and it's just absolutely critical to life as we know it, and the future of the planet and us.
MARK:Yeah, now that's great. And as we understand, it's a really important component of everything that we deal with. Unfortunately, the recent disasters that we've experienced, the bushfire, flooding, drought, have had a significant impact on biodiversity. The 2019 2020 bushfires, um, sadly around 33 people died, 3000 homes were destroyed, and 24 million hectares were burned in Australia. It was estimated that around 480 million animals were affected by those bushfires. Obviously that's a really significant component of the loss that we experienced from those bushfires. And it's a real, significant effort to recover from the impact as well. I wonder if you can put some context to the impact of those bushfires on threatened species and our native plants and animals.
RODNEY:Yeah, I think the bushfires and indeed most other sort of natural catastrophes or natural events, historically they were not as frequent or as severe or covering such large areas as they do now. So what happens historically, they would have been smaller fires, not happening as often and happening in a landscape where the wildlife can move from unburnt areas to areas that have been burnt once the vegetation regrows. And what happens in the sort of modified landscapes where you've got the mosaic of patches of vegetation or patches of bush surrounded by some houses, dissected by roads or railway or other infrastructure, is that the animals, they don't have those sort of refuges where they can basically recolonize the burnt areas. So in these fires really hot, really intense, incredibly massive unfathomable numbers of animals dying. And, now that the challenge is how do those animals get from where they did survive, which may be many, many kilometers from the burnt areas, when they have to cross roads, they have to pass through residential or cities and towns. How do they get from where they are to that recovering bush? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges is how are they going to do that? And how quickly can they do it? In fact, can they actually do it at all? So for many species, they've got very small movements, small home ranges, short distances, they travel and they just can't get back into those recolonizing. So what we find after these major events it's a bit like a step and every time you have one of these events, you go down a step and each of these steps is a fire or a flood or a drought, and that results in a major decrease or decline in the diversity of wildlife over time.
MARK:Yeah, Rodney, and I really appreciate your comments there. I know from my experiences that we, uh, personally, were affected by the bushfires, our children were evacuated from school at the time, and that was a really scary moment. And we all remember the orange skies and the cloud and the smoke through the, those 2019 2020 bushfires. It was something, uh, we've seen the images and the personal impact on peoples lives. And obviously we can only imagine what it was like for the animals in those fires as well. Prior to the bushfires, obviously in the lead up to that time, was the significant droughts we had for around a 10 year drought in Australia. And I'm sure that had a significant impact on plants and animals as well. As often happens we had the floods that followed that and we we've seen recently the impact on floods in Lismore, in Southeast Queensland and different parts of Australia. I'm wondering your thoughts on this combination or this flow on between droughts and floods. Is it something that, animals and plants can actually adapt to? Is it becoming more significant or do you find that these are more increasing challenges for our plants and animals, particularly given the fact that as you're talking about those reduced habitat for many of these species, is this something that's becoming more challenging over time?
RODNEY:Yeah, it look absolutely becoming more challenging over time. One of the key challenges we've got is trying to piece together the natural patterns of drought, flood, fires, and those, catastrophic events. And they are part of the natural system, they're part of the Australian ecosystem. There are poems that talk about lands of flooding rains and sweeping plains and all that. So it's a natural part of the Australian landscape. The first nations people talk about these, events happening in their stories, that they've passed down from generation to generation. So it's a natural part, but what's changing now is the frequency and the intensity, and people say, wildfires, they destroyed the land or they kill all the vegetation and they do, but they're also a natural part of it. So they help to regenerate the bushland and the plants, and they rely on fire. But I think we have to remember that it's not fire per se, it's not flooding per se, or it's not drought per se. It's the regime and a regime for these things includes severity, intensity, which is pretty much the same thing frequency and the spatial scale at which it happens. And what we're seeing now is increased frequency, increased intensity and larger events. So they're affecting much larger areas than they ever have in the past. And that's the challenge, for the wildlife, but also for us, how do we manage and respond to these events when they're happening at much more frequently, much larger scales and have much higher intensity.
MARK:Yes, Rodney, it's really interesting that frequency and intensity of disasters is something that across the world, people have recognized is going to be of increasing concern to people and obviously the plants and animals as well. This is not an Australian issue, this is a global issue that we're dealing with. It's obviously more difficult as you're talking about for animals to move between different habitats as those habitats are bisected as they're more separated, there's infrastructure, roads, urban development, between them. That's one of the key challenges I think that we all need to deal with in terms of the risk of natural hazards is the impact that we can have, just by existing and by the different developments that we're involved with. I wonder if you can talk about some of the developments that you're involved with and the ways in which you try and mitigate some of these impacts and particularly with consideration of that a loss of habitat.
RODNEY:I guess an area that I'm probably most closely involved in is the planning and design of roads and railways and other types of linear infrastructure. It comes down to where we build them. So, some work in Asia that we've done in sort of high rainfall areas, north Queensland would be another good example. If you build these roads and infrastructure on the side of hills, which is quite steep, and that can very easily lead to landslides. I remember visiting, Taiwan a few years ago and in some of these areas, half the hillside has been concreted above and below the road because of land slips. And so that's building infrastructure in the wrong places. And yes sometimes we need to get from A to B and we just we don't have a choice. We cannot avoid going through a certain landscape, but if we can, we should be avoiding those steep areas, with unstable soils so that we don't cause these major issues. And then for roads and rail and other infrastructure that we are building, we can include crossing structures that allow animals to get from one side of the road, to the other, uh, safely, without the risk of colliding with vehicles. They can be underpasses, culverts, bridges under roads. They can be overpasses like, vegetated land bridges that might be 50 or 70 meters wide and it's got vegetation, trees, grass, shrubs, growing on it and the animals actually cross above the road, not even realizing they're crossing a road because these continuous habitat from one side to the other and that's pretty amazing. A few months ago, I worked on a project in Kenya where we're trying to design underpasses and overpasses for giraffe. And, people say how, how do you do that? And, well, we've not actually done it before, so we don't know exactly how to do it, but needless to say, for a giraffe, the underpass needs to be tall. And you need high walls if you are building an overpass so that the giraffes can't see the oncoming traffic and that they're protected from the noise and the lights and the visual disturbance of cars and trucks. So that's in a simple sort of way we know how to do this and we've, we can do it it's engineeringly quite simple. And around the world, uh, it's common practice now on new infrastructure to build these underpasses and overpasses along with fencing because animals can't read signs. So they don't know when they hit the road to turn left or right to get to, the safe crossing. So you need fencing to stop them from crossing in the wrong places. And you can reduce wildlife mortality by up to 90% with the right design fencing and the right design, uh, crossing structures.
MARK:Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting project that you're involved with Rodney. There's significant changes in terms of natural hazards, as a result of changing climate. It's been described as one of the biggest challenges of our time. Obviously that's affecting different weather patterns, increasing temperatures, different rainfall events, across different parts of Australia in different parts of the world. In fact, 2019 was identified as the hottest year ever in Australia. And 2020 was the fourth, highest average temperatures. Apart from impacting on people, that's impacting all plants and animals and coupled with the loss of habitat, uh, clearing vegetation for urban development, agriculture, and infrastructure. There's a significant amount of pressure on our species. I wonder if you can talk about your knowledge of climate change and what you think some of the key challenges are, obviously, how do you think we can work towards trying, addressing some of those.
RODNEY:Yeah, great questions, Mark. In some ways it's a difficult answer and a difficult question. But in other ways it's a simple answer and the simple answer is we need to stop emitting CO2 and other, gases that contribute to climate change. And I think, without getting too political, we need to be pressuring politicians to, live up to their commitments and their statements about us and Australia's contribution to reducing the impacts of climate change. I mean, that's at the macro sort of high-level scale. And then at the lower scale, some of the impacts of climate change on species are things like if you're a species that lives at the tops of mountains and the temperature changes there's no where to go. If the temperature warms, you want to stay in your particular climatic envelope, which relates to temperature, relates to water, to rainfall relates to a whole range of things you want to track your changing climate. At the top of a hill, there's nowhere else to go, so those species are in trouble. The same in oceans and rivers, if the water temperature changes, uh, you need to be able to move to track your changing climate that you'd like to live in. The alternative is to that species will evolve, uh, to, to adapt. But the rate at which climate change is happening is much faster than I think the rate at which most species will be able to adapt themselves. And so they're going to be left behind. They're still requiring a particular climatic conditions, and they won't be able to adapt quickly enough. So we're going to see a lot of species and we've already started to see it. We've recorded the first species officially to go extinct from climate change, and that's the Bramble Cay Melomys, which is a small rat living in some small islands and they've gone extinct because of climate change and that's going to be the first, unfortunately, the first of many species that will go that way.
MARK:And in my limited understanding of ecology, I think that's one of the key issues, isn't it? The speed at which the climate is changing, not just the fact that it's shiny, but the speed over time, that really is making it very difficult if not impossible for many species to adapt.
RODNEY:Uh, exactly right. I mean, and people say, the planet we've been this hot before, we've been this cold before. Yeah. But not over a hundred years. Not since, in the industrial revolution, which is not that long ago, we're talking, they're talking about climate events that happened over 10,000 years or more. These are events that are happening, we can see it in our lifetime. That old, but I'm not that young either, and I can see things that are, that have changed in the last 49 years and 11 months. So wildlife and plants do not have the ability to change at the rate that they need to.
MARK:Thanks, Rodney. One of the things I know from natural hazards and dealing with disasters is the importance of social networks and community networks. In terms of both preparing for and recovering from disasters, I've noticed recently there's been a number of events where we have what's maybe you have a different term, but are called citizen scientists and these citizen scientists do a number of things they assist with monitoring data before disasters, they monitor after disasters and they collect this data and share it with each other and share it with researchers as well. A lot of those, social networks and those citizen scientists seem to be adding value to the information we currently have in terms of impacts of natural hazards. Also the same community members they really seem actively involved in assisting with recovery after disaster so they're on the ground. They're helping plant vegetation, protect wildlife, help wildlife recover, and restore areas to hopefully pre disaster conditions. I wonder if you've had some experience on citizen scientists and your views on really having a strong community network and being able to help with a lot of these areas after disasters.
RODNEY:Social communities from a people perspective are absolutely essential, as you said, Mark, without them, the recovery after disasters is much more difficult, much slower, and people get left behind and it's often the most vulnerable people, the most disadvantaged people who get behind. And I think in some ways it's very similar for wildlife and that without people assisting. Whether they are citizen scientists or whether they just, interested people, it's much slower and it's much less complete. So we need people to help out. Particularly I think in the immediate aftermath of a fire there's, I've not actually been on the fire front or straight after a fire and seen the sort of devastation and the injured animals, but it must be horrific. And I can't begin to imagine what that must be like, but we need people there to help, not capture animals, but help, take them into care and look after them and then release them again afterwards so that they play a really important role. There is one aspect though, to citizen science that I think is really important to consider in this is that people who get involved often get involved in the things that they're interested in. And so if people, if there's no sort of structure or guidance to the work that, community members and citizens scientists are doing, there may be parts of the environment, there may be aspects of the ecosystem or the function of the ecosystem that are getting missed. So I think one thing that perhaps, state government departments or, and response agencies need to think about is what are the citizen scientists doing and what are they not doing? And then also making sure that the important bits that they're not doing also get done and addressed. So I think that's something that we need to be a bit strategic about going forward.
MARK:Yeah, that's a really good point because obviously excitement needs to also be, have some sort of direction and obviously working towards a common goal. Needing some level of governance, I guess, without taking away the autonomy of many of these endeavors.
RODNEY:Absolutely. And you're right. I mean one of the reasons people get involved is because they're motivated and interested. And when you start to put too much control or red tape or bureaucracy, that then becomes another organized thing that people are less enthusiastic about.
MARK:Yeah, that's right. The other thing I wanted to talk to you today about ecology in relation to natural hazards. It's not just the impact of hazards on a native flora and fauna. It's what role, the ecology and the environment can play, helping and reducing the impact of hazards. Now, some of the things we look at, are things like green and blue infrastructure, coupled with grey infrastructure, so where, green infrastructure, we're talking about in urban areas it will be around street trees and parks. In rural areas, obviously it's around other vegetation and then we have the national parks and other reserves that we also would consider green infrastructure. In terms of blue infrastructure there can be constructed dams and storm water areas and urban locations. And then there's also existing dams in rural areas. We have rivers creeks, all the different blue infrastructure in the natural environment. And that has a significant role to play in things like reducing impacts of flooding, uh, reducing urban heat island effect. Also just providing a sense of place to many people being in and around nature provides mental health improvements and also just gives people a connection with nature that they otherwise wouldn't have. Now, these co-benefits in many ways need to be linked to the grey infrastructure, which we see in many areas, such as different stormwater, uh, pits, different, uh, power road, other different bits of infrastructure that you've been talking about. So this cross connection between green and blue and grey infrastructure, it has this really important role to play in terms of reducing the impact of natural hazards. I wonder if you have some experience in terms of that, it may be around in protecting mangroves. It may be around in coastal areas where we've tried to retire vegetation to reduce coastal erosion. Even having landscape in different native vegetation, in rural areas to help with drought conditions, to try and provide some shading and improve the moisture content of soil. There's many different ways that ecology can help reduce the impact of these natural hazards. Uh, have you got some examples?
RODNEY:Thanks. I love Mark that we're talking about blue infrastructure and green infrastructure, in the past it was just, it just got in the way of what we now call grey infrastructure. So back when we're settling and developing towns, the first thing we do is put the waterway in a, concrete pipe and get it out to the ocean as quick as we could. And now we're spending gazillions of dollars opening up those waterways and taking them out of the pipes. And, it's a thing we call daylighting, uh, waterways. Just near where I live in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne we've got quite a number of creeks that are now being daylighted and it's fantastic to see that. Just a few years ago, I was involved in the development of the metropolitan urban forest strategy for Melbourne, which the Nature Conservancy in the city of Melbourne, led the development of that. And they basically looking for setting targets for tree cover across all of greater Melbourne, and the tree cover varies and the targets vary by local government area. But it's based on the recognition that these green infrastructure, these trees and shrubs and grass, it's not just not just trees that we're talking about in the urban forest, but it's all the different layers of vegetation. They have so many benefits to people. So on really hot days, the nice leafy treeed suburbs can be three to five degrees cooler than the same areas without trees. And often it's the lower socioeconomic environments, or communities that have the lowest tree cover. Why should the people with the least ability to afford air conditioning and run air conditioning on those stinking hot days? The same people don't have the shade in their streets. So it's like a double whammy for them. They can't afford to run the air conditioning. They've often got less insulated houses and they don't have street trees to help call their houses. And so just from a real fundamental social justice perspective we need to have this green infrastructure and from a biodiversity perspective as well it's critical. On black Saturday, bushfires in Melbourne in 2009, right across Melbourne, we were finding lots of dead possums, and they had died because of the heat. And so obviously we know the impacts of those bushfires on people and communities, and it's devastating, but it's not just people that are affected, it's also the biodiversity and by having greater shade, greater tree cover, we can protect people and we can also protect wildlife.
MARK:Yeah, it's really interesting isn't it? Many of the areas where we've, channelized the waterways we're now trying to naturalize them. Um, many, government agencies, local government councils have policies around re-introducing street trees. And you're right around the social equity, there's many areas that are less socially advanced than some places, impacted by hazards. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was the role that ecology can have in different ecosystems can have in terms of reducing the impact of natural hazards, but also the threshold at which they can work, obviously preserving existing ecosystems is much better than trying to regenerate them at a later date that gives us a greater depth of ecosystems in terms of the vegetation layers the different stories and also the different habitats for threatened species. However, there is a threshold to how much of a role that natural ecosystems can have in terms of things like reducing impact of floods, reducing coastal erosion, and also helping with things like, uh, urban heat island and drought. Some disasters to just beyond the ability for ecosystems to withstand and will still be significantly impacted by some of these events. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on the best way to help these areas recover or how we can work with the environment in terms of these really large events that will continue to happen.
RODNEY:I suppose, one thing to keep in mind is that nature will always be there. And so even after a major disturbance, whether it's a wildfire or a drought or flood, plants will still regrow and something will return. But what we're going to see is a change in the plant community types. And I guess we need to understand that change is natural and change will occur anyway and yes, we don't want such rapid change in such massive change that we just can't that the wildlife and the plants and the animals can't cope with that change. But I think we also need to acknowledge that the change is going to happen and that we need to design the systems or the regenerating systems such that they maximize the outcomes for us. But also maximizing the outcomes for biodiversity. And I don't yet know how that should work or could work or how best to maximize that. Maybe the urban forest is a good example and yes we may want to hang on to some notion of, of indigenous street trees. So these are the trees that naturally would have grown in the area where we live 150 or 200 years ago. But with climate change, it's now seven degrees warmer and those indigenous trees just will not survive. So it's acknowledging that yes, the temperature has changed. There's less water available in the ecosystem, perhaps. What are the other species of trees that will grow in its place and particularly thinking about the climate in 50 years time. So it's several degrees warmer. Now, maybe it's going to be 10 degrees warmer in 50 years compared to what it was before we built our cities and towns. So understanding what the future conditions are and what the thresholds that the species that we're selecting now can handle, will help us plan for and design and create, ecosystems that will be surviving and thriving into the future. And it's understanding also that it's going to be different from what we see today, just as today is different from what it was 150 years ago and that change is not always necessarily a bad thing. Yes. We don't want the great barrier reef to die and something to take its place. I'm not talking about that scale of thing that's going to change because we should be fighting for certain things to not change as well. So the great barrier reef we should be pulling out all stops to make sure that does not die and become this barren wasteland in the ocean. But what I'm talking about here are those places where we've already dramatically altered what's there. So those street trees I'm talking about. It's picking species that will grow and perform the functions that we need them to in 50 years time.
MARK:Yeah, thanks, Rodney. And really just to close out this discussion today, I'd like to understand your thoughts on the future of ecosystems under a climate change scenario, the different biodiversity challenges that we'll all going to have to deal with and also the best areas to target ecology and the landscape to help reduce the impact of these hazards. And really where to from here for the next 20 or 50 years.
RODNEY:It's absolutely critical that we understand what is happening, to which species and where, and the rate at which it's happening so that we can, develop effective strategies that can either jump in and save certain species or certain ecosystems, because for certain things we may want to try and save them and we should be trying to save many of them. For others it's understanding how those species are adapting to that changing climate. And so for them we don't need to be that interventionist, we can just track how they're tracking see how they're going. And if we do need to step in that we can at that point. It's also, I think, important that we enable ecosystems to move. Often we talk about individual species and so we want to get a Koala from one side of the road to the other, but we also need to get the trees that, that Koala lives on. If, the climate changes enough that those species can no longer survive where they currently are and they need to move up the hill a hundred meters or 500 meters or kilometers across the landscape. How do we get entire ecosystems to be able to track that change in climate? And that's about making sure that there are as minimal barriers as possible in place that could prevent or slow down the dispersal of plants and animals. So that it's not just one animal that's moving, but it's whole communities and ecosystems eventually that move across the landscape. And I think that will be when we look back in 150 or 250 years, that will be one of the things that we get judged on is to what extent have we enabled entire communities of plants and animals that have evolved together? How have they moved across the landscape and adapted to these changing climates?
MARK:Excellent answer and a great way to wrap up. I think that's an opportunity and challenge for all of us. And it is part or the future ready approach that we're all trying to adapt. That is considering conditions now and let's, aim for improvements in the future as much as we can in terms of the work that we're involved with. Great to talk to you, Rodney. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
RODNEY:Uh, a pleasure Mark and thanks for the opportunity and I look forward to future conversations.
MARK:Me to thanks, Rodney.
RODNEY:Cheers, bye
MARK:Thanks to Rodney and thanks to everyone for listening in. It's been a really great chat and I've learned a lot from Rodney today. If you're interested in the work we're doing, please get in touch. Our links will be in the podcast show notes. Thanks for listening.