Planning for Natural Hazards: Public Interest

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 seventh episode John Brockhoff, National Policy Director at the Planning Institute of Australia, joins Mark to share his knowledge and experience as a planner and how he uses his skills in the public interest to share land in a way that works for an increasingly uncertain future with a changing climate.

Transcript

Planning for Natural Hazards - Ep7 Public Interest 

[00:00:00] Mark Maund: Hi everyone and welcome to the People and Place Podcast by WSP. My name is Dr. Mark Maund and I'm WSP's Planning and Approvals Team lead for Regional New South Wales and ACT. This year on the People In 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 and their continuing connection to culture, community, land, sea, and sky. We pay our respect to elders past, present, and future. Today we are talking to John Brockoff. He's the National Policy Director for the Planning Institute of Australia. He's a registered planner and a fellow at PIA with over 30 years experience in the public sector and consulting. John's responsible for guiding the Planning Institute of Australia's national policy positions. He works with PIA's membership to advocate for reform that strengthens the value of planning. It's great to have you here. John. Would you like to just introduce yourself please?

[00:01:12] John Brockhoff: Thanks, Mark. I'm John Brockhoff. I'm the National Policy Director at the Planning Institute of Australia, and that's PIA. PIA exists to represent the values of professional planners, whether they be in councils, consulting, property industry, different levels of government, and we're all brought together around how we use our skills in the public interests to share land in a way that works for the future and an increasingly uncertain future with a changing climate, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity working for the planning institute because we go from one minute dealing with floods and fires to dealing with the economics of the environment to housing policy, to planning system reform. And for someone who's as curious as I am and all my colleagues at PIA, it's really great fun.

[00:02:02] Mark Maund:  Working in planning, as we both know, is quite a challenging environment and there's a lot of different bits of information that we need to go through and address and help make decisions. What I do understand is that the role of PIA is to strengthen the value of planning in the community and how it's understood in the community. Planners have different roles in our community, in local government, state government, and in consulting. Can you talk a little bit about the approach for PIA in dealing with those different avenues of planning and how we'll bring all the information together and the policies that come together across those different organisations and situations.

[00:02:34] John Brockhoff: I think all of us in planning are involved in how we share land and how we share what we do with land and we each attack it in a different way. Some of us are regulators, some of us are working with proponents, some of us are working on information to support decisions on how we share land and how care for it or invest in it.

But I think there's a common appreciation of the public interest. What is the public interest? How does the public interest lie when we are sharing land and I totally respect that the public interest is gonna be different from a First Nations perspective, from an ecocentric perspective, from a local community, neighborhood perspective but it's still a really useful context to examine where does the public interest lie? How does the profession support different dimensions of the public interest? And how do we as planners bring the tools of planning to ensure our profession makes a difference. 

[00:03:28] Mark Maund:  Yeah and that's a really great point, John. What do you think are some of the best ways to inform the public on the roles of planning and in creating healthy and resilient communities? 

[00:03:38] John Brockhoff: Well as planners we're intimately involved with land and the future of land and the future of communities and how they work and live and enjoy places and I think there's a natural interest for the community to understand what we do and in fact, so many, people I speak to as a planner are instant planning experts but what the community at large, I think, appreciate is that it's not just about expertise in planning law or, viability or, bushfire assessment. It's a particular skill that planners have in being able to look right across the range of fields that affect how we live in a place and work out priorities, work out ways in which we can make orderly decisions, and ultimately how we can deliver a future that works for us based on community and stakeholder involvement in a strategy and I'd love to bring it back to the precedence of strategy. 

[00:04:37] Mark Maund:  Yeah, that's great, John. I really agree so that long-term view I think is really important and we've seen recently the important focus of planning for resilient communities. The Planning Institute of Australia I know has policies in certain areas, including climate change and resilient communities. PIA has the National Land Use Guidelines for Disaster Resilient Communities, which is a really useful document that provides a national framework for planning. There are some other documents as well, such as the United Nations Words into Action series and there's also the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. So across all these really important policies it'll be good to understand how PIA brings them all together. 

[00:05:16] John Brockhoff: Yeah, thanks, Mark. I think all of that comes down to a couple of key points. Firstly, if you can't remove the risk, move people from the risk, and then secondly, we keep hearing about build back better. It's not build back better, it's build back more resilient. Those two simple homilies summarise PIA's involvement across all of this work.

 It's about understanding the uncertainties that we are dealing with and recognising that there's risk out there and we've got to deal with that accordingly. It's how can strategic planning play its role much more forthrightly in moving people from the risk and I'd love you to ask me a question about getting past this word resilience because it's in real trouble of going down the same road that the word sustainability's gone down. 

[00:06:02] Mark Maund:  Okay, well I'll take that prompt, John. Then let's talk about resilience. I think it's a really important objective to have a resilient community, but yes, that can mean many different things. Does that mean that you have, in some cases, some sacrificial buildings or you don't build in some areas or you build buildings that have a certain design in some areas or only allow certain land uses in some areas at risk of disasters.

So in terms of yourself, John, and also PIA's approach to resilience, it would be really great to hear your understanding of that term and what you think it looks like for future communities. 

[00:06:33] John Brockhoff: It's very hard to plan around the concepts you just described, but if you flip the concept around 180 and say, well, what do we plan for? We plan to make our communities, our places more resilient and to do that, we want to strengthen characteristics of the systems we plan within. That then asks the question well what are the characteristics of resilient systems? And what can planning do to strengthen those characteristics of resilient systems? 

I'd argue that the elements of resilience systems provide us a really strong way of dealing with increasing uncertainty in the natural environment, particularly as it relates to hazards and climate. And we can ask ourselves, well, what are the elements of resilient systems that can help us plan better in that circumstance and there's been some great work by Rod Simpson and others looking at, well, what about if we look at resilient systems in terms of is our planning, a strategic planning system? Does it look at diversity and scenarios and look at alternatives, and there's a real opportunity to test our strategic planning competencies with asking: when we do a strategic plan, does it look at a diversity of different solutions and timeframes for the future? and does it use scenarios rather than track here are we now in 2022 and this is where we want to be in 2050? , what are the pathways along the way and what might be the scenarios that we might want to test that will help us navigate a course knowing full well that there's no straight line between now and 2050, and that there'll be multiple interferences, pivot points where we have to change our strategy, but we can, looking at different scenarios for the future, look at a pathway or multiple pathways of no regrets, and then identify in future, what the pivot points might be. 

I think another one is this notion of redundancy and modularity, which is a strange way of saying we've gotta allow ourselves to fail and be quite relaxed about that. We seem to be pent up as planners about getting it right between what we're planning for and what's gotta happen in the future but I think we've gotta allow ourselves to fail and build in a degree of redundancy and modularity into our strategic planning. I think that's an element of being more resilient. It's a great way of dealing with uncertainty. And lastly, I think it's really important if we are looking at the elements of resilient systems, is to go back to this old notion of subsidiarity. Make sure the least centralized, most locally conscious decision making body is equipped to make the decisions that need to be made. That might be the council, it might be a community group or if it's a major investment, it might be the state government, but the lowest level where the best decision can be made. 

[00:09:18] Mark Maund:  That's great insight, John. I think that's a really important future in that we test scenarios, and you're right, we can't be perfect in our predictions. We do make mistakes. One of the things I think we're learning to be better at, and maybe is an area for improvement, is monitoring decisions. I do note that the New South Wales flood inquiry looked at that history of decisions in floodplains and one of the things that they talked about is decisions were made, for instance, to build in a floodplain and then a flood occurs, people think that we'll move to other areas and then a few years later, people make the same decisions to building floodplains again. I think they use the term rinse and repeat in the inquiry. So, I think learning from our decisions and monitoring our decisions is really important and as I said, it's been identified in a number of areas. How do you think we can improve that monitoring? 

[00:10:05] John Brockhoff: That's a great comment, rinse and repeat. Before I get to your monitoring question, I'd love to just explore that around, we don't really ask ourselves, I mean, we do in a proxy sort of way with our strategic planning, but we don't really ask ourselves clearly enough, what is our appetite for risk and there are some absolutes in terms of our appetite for risk, and I think human life. Where is human life at risk? And clearly human life is at risk where there's catastrophic flooding. It's very frequent and it's very dangerous, and you don't just get wet feet, you die. So that's where we've got an issue of the extreme end of risk appetite. 

And then the other end of the spectrum, you know, we've got a risk appetite which would be expressed by a community around, we don't mind getting the odd flood. For instance, the ground is flat for a hundred miles around this river and town and we are never gonna build ourselves out of it. We've had our house flooded and we certainly didn't mind it, but it's an acceptable risk. If there are different levels of acceptable risk, are we planning these in the way we do our flood planning? Sure we are through our manuals. We have flood levels and we plan for those but what about asking the community in the strategic planning process what is the acceptable level of risk? 

I would like to think that future strategic plans for our region start to play out well these are the areas that are absolutely threatening to human life, and we will look at planned retreat and look at the most extreme planning controls. These are areas that seem to have less life-threatening flood or other hazard situations and can be managed through safe access and egress or staying in place and being safe for some time. 

These are the sorts of community facilities that we need to plan in any case and all of this can be integrated in community adaptation plans or resilience plans that can be linked to the long-term planning strategy and also to the emergency planning strategies of the hazard authorities that are out there.

 So this notion of risk appetite, building in community priorities for what they think is important in planning and dealing with their own risks, working out what they're comfortable with, and then having that reflected in resilient strategies that are linked to regional and district strategic plans for the long term of decisions on land use. I haven't answered your question on monitoring very well, Mark, but I totally agree. The monitoring is essential to keep top of mind the situations that we find ourselves in Australia, particularly given the climate cycles that we seem to historically have with, you know, El Nino and Southern Oscillation Index and the Indian Ocean Dipole and whatever. There seems to be cycles happening at decade or intervals and we need to have a much deeper understanding of the world we live in. But we also have increasing uncertainty with climate change, and I think monitoring the past might not be the only answer. I think we've got a plan for an uncertain future and hence harking back to that discussion we had earlier about how do we build resilience into our planning systems.

[00:13:05] Mark Maund:  Yeah that was a great discussion, John. I agree. The planning for uncertainty is another focus that's really trying to make decisions around the best information you have at the time and sometimes it's not at an appropriate level of information that you need to make a fully informed decision. So you really just gather all that information, gather all the experts, and yeah, make that decision that hopefully will achieve the best outcome. One of the things I would be really interested to hear from you about is legacy decisions. I agree, harking back to the past all the time isn't always productive. However, sometimes we are left with planning decisions that have been made over time, again, with the best interests at the time and with the best information we have but there are some communities that are currently exposed to hazard risk. There's been some ways that they've sought to, I guess, deal with those legacy decisions. One of them, you may be aware of, Grantham in Queensland where they moved an entire town, or people who put their hand up to be moved outta the flood prone area. And there's some discussions currently happening in, North East New South Wales around some of the flood areas and what they could do to existing buildings, land uses, and how those communities can be built differently as much as possible. So these legacy decisions also create a challenge for planners. I'd be really interested to understand from your perspective and how PIA looks to approach some of these legacy decisions in terms of if we can reduce that risk or at least improve outcomes for the communities living there.

[00:14:34] John Brockhoff: Thanks, Mark. This question's live, of course. We've got a bill for the New South Wales Reconstruction Authority that went through Parliament last week. We watched over the last decade the work in Grantham, which is an outstanding case example of, this notion of planned retreat. If the risk is catastrophic, if we can't mitigate the risk, let's move people away from the risk and that's what happened to Grantham. Grantham was, although quite a small village, it was I guess viable without too many zeros on the back of the investment to have a very well thought through, very hands-on, community involved. But that detailed and intense treatment can't be replicated over hundreds of centers that are becoming more in threat. So we do need some systems in place to deal with the prioritization of how we deal with legacy risks. There's gonna be a set of them that are like Grantham where human life is at threat from catastrophic risks, whether it be flood or fire and if we can't manage that risk in those sorts of situations, then we've gotta deal with a planned retreat, But we can't do that everywhere and we've got to ask ourselves, well, how do we set the priorities for where we invest in planned retreat?

 I think this is the role of regional strategic planning. Yes, those places where everyone lives from an individual farm or household to a city are important for how people live and go about their day-to-day lives and that's incredibly important, but there's also a broader significance that the community has a whole, in terms of the role of different centers and cities. For instance, Lismore, it's a regional service center for the Northern rivers. It performs a vitally important role as a hub for Agriculture, a way of centralizing services so people can live and enjoy good wellbeing in that part of the world, access substantial retail, have a whole range of higher jobs clustered in a place with specializations that relates to Northern Rivers. It serves a really important strategic function as a regional service center, and that's a role that the community and the state can't afford to lose. So there's these planning reasons as well as the community individual household reasons to want to have a successful Lismore . So if it's of personal importance and a strategic importance and its under threat in a way that threatens human life, then it must find its way to the top of the list for planning for an investment in planned retreat. PIA have been actively involved with experts who've plotted pathways for dealing with planned retreated at Lismore that essentially need to be community led and need to work out a plan that can result in a Lismore that has its essential functions preserved. So there's that at the extreme end, but there's a lot of gray below that. Where is it appropriate through planning and resilient strategies to defend circumstances where the risk appetite and the hazard is not as extreme but may be worsening. How do we have communities using the best available evidence with their councils coming up with a patchwork of strategies that may involve defensive strategies, may involve planning strategies around future development, or may involve development standards that pulled up a run. Then lastly, there are other legacy decisions where the threat might be very great, but the asset might be also very great and the opportunity for relocation at scale might be beyond us. I'm thinking examples here, like Ballina Town Centre, you know, that that may well be a candidate where there's too much sunk already into that centre to ever think of a relocation solution and it may be an investment solution in defending it in place. Unless we have those conversations and ask ourselves which are areas that are catastrophically at threat, we may need to invest in planned retreat, particularly where they serve a strategic planning function, which are centers that involve defence in place to defend that substantial investment that could be defended over time, and then which are those settlements which we can plan to cut our losses and plan so that future development is safe and that the hazard can be managed for existing development. And by that I mean which, centers where we ensure that future development is above whatever's determined as a satisfactory flood level or bush fire hazard area and what might be supporting investment over time in terms of access and egress that might be flood free , or safe from fire. 

So because there's prioritisation involved, think that's again a role for the community and a role for strategic planning and one of the things that came out of both the Bushfire Royal Commission and the state version of that and the flood inquiry was this clear role for strategic planning to help the community or to provide a context for the community to decide what their risk appetite was and how might we plot a way forward?

[00:19:26] Mark Maund:  Yeah, that was a really interesting discussion, John. I mean you've captured a lot of information there that is really what we look at and everyone in the planning industry looks at, so in terms of risk, what's an acceptable form of risk to different communities, the nature of land uses and the options available in terms of, engineering solutions, relocation, changing land uses. 

There's so many layers to this conversation. That was a really, really useful summary. 

[00:19:50] John Brockhoff: Can I just say Mark? Mary O'Cain called it taking a risk weighted approach was I think her summary in the flood inquiry.

[00:19:58] Mark Maund:  Yeah and Mary's done a great job in that flood inquiry and the risk waiting is really the next conversation I think in terms of how are those waitings decided and who informs those? It obviously has to be the community and everyone who's affected, and then the decision makers and people writing the strategic planning policies as well.

 So it's a really good way to focus on again, what's an acceptable level of risk and how do we determine that? And then what decisions do we make after that? One of the other things I did want talk to you about John is the disasters that we're dealing with, or the hazards that create these disasters. Bush fires, flooding, also coastal erosion, heatwaves. These cross boundaries and borders so in terms of that and how to address that, I think one of the things I advocate for is a national policy or a national approach to a lot of these issues and I think Pia has a key role to play in that. Can you have a conversation for us or present some of PIA's ideas in terms of how do we achieve a national approach to these issues? And really getting a level of consistency as much as possible across decisions made that consider some of these issues. 

[00:21:04] John Brockhoff: PIA does have an interest in planning for climate uncertainty, planning for hazards, at a national scale, but we're acutely aware that the tools of planning very much are state and local oriented. But that's not to say there isn't a really valuable role that we can play collaboratively amongst states and local councils across borders, and then with some national leadership on those issues. I'd start with this notion of where does the nation, and our commonwealth government have the most important role in planning places? I'd argue that it's around setting clear and consistent parameters for planning for growth in a changing climate. By that I mean ensuring that we aren't reinventing the wheel at each local government area, but adopting, common sets of climate change, sea level rise, urban heat and so forth, parameters. That's not to say that every regional district's gonna have a different climate challenge in terms of urban heat or the way the coastline functions in terms of coastal erosion but at the global level we can adopt some common assumptions and have some coherent and consistent pathways for assessing risk at the high level. I'd like to think that regional strategies, if they're done in Geraldton or if they're done in Byron Bay, are using climate parameters, which are largely global, that are using scenarios that are broadly consistent, using methodologies to develop those scenarios, whether it be for urban heat, maybe the modeling for coastal processes for flooding that adopts, consistent, coherent frameworks and parameters for how those, risks unfold globally and if we do have those consistent, coherent, and potentially common scenarios and parameters for planning, how might the commonwealth communicate that? And I, and I think there's an argument for a national settlement strategy that communicates what those parameters are and points out where that risks unfolding to different degrees I'd also argue, or at least PIA's arguing that a national settlement strategy would have comparable but broader roles in terms of how we plan for growth at a national scale. If we have an awareness of where natural hazards and risk are most prone, we can also have a view as to where our investment in cities and city infrastructure can be most productive, and look at the very broadest level where growth at a national scale makes the most sense. I'm not arguing for any direct national involvement on who goes where, but some broad guidance on where there's opportunity and capacity. I think it'd be very welcome across the different states. 

[00:23:40] Mark Maund:  Yeah. No, that's great. That's really important. You've identified the need for access to quality, consistent information and the National Settlement Strategy I think is a great initiative from PIA. We are almost out of time, John, so I'm just wondering if there's any other things you wanted to discuss or talk about in terms of this really important conversation.

[00:23:58] John Brockhoff: That discussion we had about the national role, it draws its attention back to planning systems that operate mostly out of state legislation. The way we make decisions on future development really is under a planning act of some sort in every state and territory. So, the way the planning industry through PIA wanted to influence each and every state planning system was through throwing up 10 climate asks. This is in terms of how we respond to climate change through planning systems. 10 climate asks that we expect each state and territory planning system to respond in a different way. So there's no prescriptive answer for how you respond to, for instance, adopting carbon budgets at a precinct scale or adopting flood levels for future communities, but we can ask every planning system around the country to respond to different benchmarks that demand action. So PIA have had this advocacy plan that we've been rolling out for the last year of how does each state and territory respond to improving our regional strategies to deal with climate resilience? How do each and every planning system deal with enabling renewable energy projects to proceed as smoothly as possible through the planning system. How does each and every planning system adopt the best practice performance criteria for low energy buildings or use of renewables and sustainable houses? So we've been trying to ensure that the great work in each state and territory is understood by every other state and territory and that all of them are pushed towards best practice as fast as possible.

[00:25:37] Mark Maund:  Thanks, John. It has been great talking to you and I think you've reaffirmed for me the importance of planning in dealing with natural hazards and the really important role that town planners have in helping dealing with a lot of the challenges we have to deal with in the future and we're currently dealing with and really sharing that information as much as possible across the industry is a really important way to help each other make informed decisions and build on the knowledge that we have access to information, sharing that information, best outcomes, really important processes within, and I really appreciate the role that yourself and PIA have in helping forward or present a lot of that information to the community. Thanks for your time John. 

[00:26:17] John Brockhoff: Thanks, Mark and thanks for your role particularly with New Planner. 

[00:26:20] Mark Maund:  Thank you so much for joining me and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you're interested in the work we're doing, please get in touch. Our links will be in the podcast show notes.