Presentation short abstract

Without understanding the non-material impacts of poor disaster response, climate change will continue to erode the liveability of places. This paper explores these issues in a flood affected town in Australia, where a strong and well-funded state could have done better.

Presentation long abstract

While debates surrounding uninhabitability under climate change create a dichotomy between habitable and uninhabitable, uninhabitability is driven from within by structural factors that drive vulnerability and poor disaster response. Thus, counter to some discourses, there will be no safe place in which people can take refuge under future climate change. This paper explores the non-material factors that undermine the liveability of place post-disaster. The research focuses on Lismore, a town in regional Australia that, while accustomed to flooding, experienced flood heights in 2022 that were two metres higher than recorded in written records. The response from the government was commensurate to the impact, promising a transformational approach that would build a Lismore fit for the future, ultimately investing a billion Australian dollars. However, government decisions, driven by risk aversion, market priorities and top-down decision-making, and amplified by local politics, undermined the transformational nature of the response and ultimately the viability of place. The mismatch between the pace and priorities of reconstruction and unmet humanitarian needs eroded residents’ trust in government, generated grief over the missed opportunity for radical change, and caused psychological trauma and detachment from place, undermining life in the community and causing unnecessary displacement. As extreme weather becomes more widespread and intense there is increasing need to ensure repeated events do not lead to inevitable decline and to understand non-material trade-offs that occur during disaster response.