King tides give residents a view into the future of our coasts

TWICE a year, the tides reach their peak. And when they do, the sea washes over piers and paths, and inundates parks. It’s a prelude to a coastline with higher seas all year round – one in which seaside real estate will be at increasing risk.

“King tides are a great proxy,” says Caitlin Calder-Potts, from Green Cross Australia. “They’re a way of bridging the gap between an abstract projection for sea level rise, and actually seeing what the impacts are in your local area. By observing them, we can understand how our coasts might change.”

To that end, she’s coordinating a project called Witness King Tides, in which citizens photograph while the waters rise. You can register online, then upload your snaps of the seaside.

The next big tide during daylight hours will sweep the Victorian coastline from May 26 to 30. It peaks in Portland at lunchtime on the 26^th, for example, or Port Welshpool at dusk on the 30^th. (Find the exact tide times on the Bureau of Meteorology website.)

The project started in New South Wales in 2009, and since then, it’s been held in Queensland and southern Tasmania. So far, wave watchers have uploaded 4000 images. Many show coastlines coping well, but elsewhere, infrastructure is already at risk.

“We’ve had feedback from lots of surf life saving clubs saying they’re vulnerable, and community spaces like parks and foreshores too. Erosion and estuarine flooding are fairly common during king tides,” Ms Calder-Potts says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The project’s popularity isn’t surprising: more than 8 out of ten Australians live near the coast, and there are over 700,000 homes within 3 kilometres of the sea.

According to the Climate Commission, sea levels are likely to rise by between half a metre and one metre by 2100. Even at the lower end, that could increase the frequency of flooding by several hundred times.

But last year, the Victorian government last year scrapped a requirement to plan for 80 centimetres sea level rise by the end of the century (except for new “greenfields” developments).

Professor Bruce Thom, former chair of the federal Coasts and Climate Change Council, says the planning system should adopt higher-end thresholds for developments that are expected to last.

He was part of a 2009 government study into the climate change risks to Australia’s coast. It found that hundreds of thousands of buildings would be at risk of flooding and damage under a high sea level rise scenario that coincides with a storm surge.

Prof Thom says king tides – which aren’t connected with human-caused global warming – help us understand sea level rise because they make local impacts clear.

(“King tide” isn’t a scientific term. It refers to the biggest of the regular “spring tides”, which occur when the Moon is full or new, and aligned with the Earth and the Sun.)

Local knowledge is useful, because sea level is more complex than you might think. Firstly, the ocean isn’t flat – it’s constantly in flux, in the same way as the atmosphere moves according to high and low pressure systems. Secondly, tidal levels depend on the shape of the shoreline.

“What happens at a particular place can vary enormously because of the nature of the bays, inlets, lakes and lagoons,” Prof Thom says.

Climate change causes sea level rise in two main ways: by increasing ocean temperatures (water expands as it warms) and by melting glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

“In certain parts of Australia we’ve had a very small amount of sea level rise going on for some time,” he says. “The fear scientists have is that the rate of rise will increase – that it isn’t linear and could be exponential. The big concern is disturbance to the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic ice sheet.”

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In 2020, could citizens hold the power?

MAY 12, 2020: Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by nearly a third in the last decade, according to a report by the Department of Energy Transition, Efficiency and Enoughness.

The report showed a dramatic shift to localised, renewable energy production, made possible by radical improvements in efficiency. One in every three Australian households supplies its own electricity – whether individually, in clusters or small communities.

The report highlighted three key drivers for change: the affordability and reliability of solar photovoltaic panels and ongoing improvements in batteries; the community campaign to switch from fossil fuels; and the Great Firestorm Summer of 2016. It found that those tragic bushfires were a catalyst for the technology to leap from the fringes into the mainstream.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

What’s all this? It’s a composite of future scenarios imagined by Alan Pears, adjunct professor at RMIT University, and energy consultant Tosh Szatow – both of whom are advocates for localised, not centralised, electricity generation.

While such a rapid switch away from the grid seems hard to imagine, Mr Pears argues that the indicators of change are already with us.

“There are so many emerging options for distributed energy, smart backup generators and battery storage, together with efficiency to dramatically reduce our needs, that the old electricity industry can’t win,” he says. “The centralised technology solution they’re offering will be out-competed by these diverse solutions.”

Appliance manufacturers are already prototyping “smart energy packages” for households: a combination of home-scale renewable energy, together with storage, efficient appliances and monitoring systems.

Mr Pears says big-box appliance retailers will begin selling those packages on a pay-as-you-go, no upfront cost basis.

How will the existing electricity networks and regulators respond? One possibility is that they’ll attempt to maintain profitability by switching to capacity charges – where you pay for the amount of network capacity you need at your peak usage – or by increasing fixed fees.

“Even now my fixed electricity charge is significantly more than half of my bill,” Mr Pears says. “I’m grouchy about that. Fixed charges are regressive – they fall disproportionately on low-income and low-energy users.”

He believes that either way, there’ll come a time when going off-grid becomes the most attractive option. “People who live simply and have low consumption will be the first to move off-grid in the city,” he says.

Mr Szatow, from Energy for the People, agrees that the trend is toward more local generation and storage of power, and more self-reliant homes and communities.

“It was only in about 2000 that the world started taking solar photovoltaic panels seriously. By 2012 in Australia, the price had come down to the point where it was cheaper to produce your energy than buy it from the grid,” he says.

Some households will go it alone, while others – with the help of new energy services businesses – will combine to buy extra storage and backup generators.

“Changes always begins in a niche,” Mr Szatow says. “The niche for small-scale energy generation is where the centralised grid is weakest – for example, in new suburb developments where the network hasn’t been built, or in remote areas where reliability is poor or the servicing costs are high.”

He argues there are several possible catalysts (and timelines) for the niche to become mainstream, including natural disasters, cheap battery technology developed in response to high oil prices, and new energy service models.

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Green roofs and streetscapes make a cool change for the city

FROM his own patch of turf in Coburg, Emilio Fuscaldo can see south all the way to the skyscrapers. The grass is on his roof.

It’s one of only a few residential green roofs in Melbourne.

Mr Fuscaldo is the founder of Nest Architects; his motives were both private and public. “It’s incumbent on architects to practice what we preach. I wanted to show that you can devote a large percentage of your budget to sustainability,” he says. “You can compromise on other things, such as kitchens, cupboards and tiles, and still achieve a beautiful result.”

Before the soil was installed, Mr Fuscaldo and his partner lived in their home for a summer and most of winter. The difference was immediately clear: with the slab of earth overhead, their heating bill halved. In the summer, the temperature is now always tolerable without air conditioning.

“You cool and heat when you hit the extremes and we’re not hitting the extremes,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Mr Fuscaldo estimates that the green roof added between $20,000 and $30,000 to the cost of the home (the biggest expense is waterproofing). “This wasn’t an exercise in affordability. It’s about assigning your budget the right way,” he says.

The couple bought the back of someone else’s block, and designed an elegant, two-bedroom house to fit the space. But although the backyard has gone, the living roof means the bugs and birds sill have a place to be.

The rainwater in their tank gets filtered through the vegetation and the roof also reduces stormwater runoff during heavy rain. Most of their plants are ornamental, but this autumn, their rooftop plot delivered a zucchini as large as their infant son.

There’s another, less tangible, benefit too. “It feels amazing to be in the house and know that between you and the world is this amount of land,” Mr Fuscaldo says. “It’s like being in a cave. It really adds to your experience of dwelling.”

If you’d like to follow suit, there’s a heavy catch. Existing roofs aren’t strong enough to bear the load without expensive retrofitting.

With that snag in mind, Melbourne resident Shelley Meagher founded ‘Do It On The Roof’, a campaign to put green roofs on the places that can already cope best: commercial buildings.

Together with several other volunteers, Dr Meagher is calling for a public green roof in Melbourne’s CBD.

The City of Melbourne’s open space plan, released last year, showed that in the heart of the city – around Elizabeth and Bourke Streets – there’s no public open space within a walkable distance.

“Thermal imaging studies of Melbourne show that the hottest part of the city is around Hardware Lane,” Dr Meagher says. “Having buildings surrounded by concrete leads to increases in temperatures – that’s the urban heat island effect, and green roofs help reduce it.”

Climate scientist and adaptation expert Professor Roger Jones, from Victoria University, says it’s crucial we build cool, reflective or permeable streetscapes, as well as green roofs. They’ll not only help us cope with a hotter climate, but also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

“The difference between an urban forest and an adjoining suburb can be as much as 5 degrees,” he says. “We need cool spots for people on hot days, so we’re not all indoors by an air conditioner. We have to design places people want to be.”

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Kinglake residents came out of the fire and into a plan – it just wasn’t theirs.

LAST Sunday, over seventy people gathered in the renovated, rebuilt hall at Kinglake Central. David Engwicht, a placemaking expert, told the audience that the fire was an opportunity “to burn the triviality” from their lives. They could create community, relationships and “systemic resilience”, however they wanted.

It was the first week of a free, two-part event called Regenerating, sponsored by RMIT University, Australian National University and CSIRO.

The speakers – under the themes of people, place, prosperity and preparedness – covered an extraordinary range of disciplines, from firestorm physics and vulnerable ecosystems, to regional economies and social media.

The event was organised by Daryl Taylor, from the Kinglake Ranges Community Resilience Committee. He says a common thread emerged: the need for communities to take back control of decision-making. And that’s a lesson relevant for citizens elsewhere, with many towns and suburbs facing uncertain futures.

The latest report by the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, stated that climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts, storms and sea-level rise. “The southeast of Australia, including many of our largest population centres, stands out as being at increased risk,” it said.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Kinglake, Mr Engwicht said no one could be sure which challenges will come first. Planning only for specific threats can, counter-intuitively, make you more vulnerable to unexpected ones.

The second day of the event will be held on Sunday May 5. The speakers include historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and psychiatrist Paul Valent, author of From Survival to Fulfillment.

Mr Taylor says that, in organising the event, the committee members were motivated by their experiences since the fires – especially the contradiction between locals’ willingness and capacity to act, and the stifling nature of the assistance they received.

“A disaster is a tragedy, but also an opportunity to regenerate, to rethink and redesign. We lost unique opportunities because state government, corporations and NGOs had pre-determined agendas and one-size-fits-all strategies,” he says. “‘Engagement’ was too often about engaging with someone else’s prefigured plan.

“Our communities were incredibly creative after the fires. We self-organised to meet our fundamental human and social needs – often without external help, and by flying under the radar. But as we became exhausted, it became difficult to act outside the government matrix.

“People don’t really need welfare and command-and-control directives. They need empowerment. They don’t really need donated undies and toothbrushes. They need to be supported to collaborate and make critical decisions about their communities’ futures.

If he could, he’d bypass the idea of “recovery” altogether. “Recovery can be a dog-whistle for counselling, welfare agencies and dependency. It’s backward looking and doesn’t address what makes communities truly flourish,” he says.

This year, Mr Taylor and his family are renting in Eltham. They’d been living in temporary housing until a few months ago. His daughter can now walk to high school, but it’s been a difficult transition in other ways.

“I’m really feeling the anonymity of the suburbs,” he says. “In Kinglake, when I came home, it was nothing to see several cars at our property and people everywhere. We got through the last four years on the strength of our social relationships – we did everything together.

“The experience has been extraordinary. While you wouldn’t wish it on anyone, it’s been rich with learning.”

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