Adapting to climate change

Thank you for sharing Brian Melley’s insightful article about the apparently indiscriminate distribution of flood damage to people’s homes across Houston during hurricane Harvey (“Tale of two cities,” Cape Breton Post, Sept. 9).

Of course, in retrospect, if not in foresight, the urban planners of that wealthy city have the ability to calculate rather precisely which properties will flood, and which will not, under a given precipitation event or storm surge.

What they obviously don’t have is the ability to remove allocated land from use, or force people to build on higher ground. They will have to wait for natural forces to do that. It won’t take long, but it will hurt!

It seems ridiculous to compare Sydney’s Thanksgiving Day flood with Houston’s Harvey, but the scaling is not bad: 15 homes destroyed out of a total of 15,000 as a result of 225mm of rain in Sydney, versus 35,000 homes lost from a total of 800,000 as a result of 1,300mm of rain in Houston (do the math).

Despite the order of magnitude differences, I guess that the experience of the people who lost their homes in Sydney is essentially the same as that of their flooded counterparts in Houston.

The defining difference for me is not the impact of the disaster, but the planning response of the cities’ people. In Sydney, governments and homeowners quickly agreed not to rebuild homes on site, but to move the neighbourhood to higher ground. This is a great example of “Human Adaptation to Climate Change.”

People are going to be doing a lot of that as we move though this century, and we are lucky to be doing it here. The CBRM has a superb urban planning department with state-of-the-art mapping and elevation models, and owns lots of high ground surrounding the city away from the floodplain.

That is our affordable retreat path from rising seas and more intense storms. We have much better capacity than Houston to imagine our city in 2100 and plan well for it; let’s realize the opportunity!