Why we must navigate the state’s perfect storm
A 30-year climate outlook is shaping the risk profile for properties prone to bushfires, floods and coast erosion. Scientific modelling reveals thousands of NSW homeowners and investors face a perfect storm with severe consequences to land values, zoned restrictions, and insurance premiums. The situation is being closer monitors by all states and territories.
WITH Australians suffering through the past five years of intense climate-related disasters, analysts and lawyers are warning that prospective homeowners and investors could be buying into a perfect storm.
And making buyers aware of the potential risks to any property of bushfire, coastal erosion, rising sea levels and riverine flooding could be a compliance issue for property lawyers and conveyancers.
According to analysis by international legal firm Norton Rose Fulbright, commissioned by property data experts Groundsure, Australian real estate lawyers and conveyancers already have a “duty of care to advise and warn their clients about climate risks”.
“Whilst when the duty of care to advise on climate risks is factually dependent and vary from case to case, it is considered that lawyers are currently obliged to advise on climate risks and were potentially obliged to do as early as 2021,” counsels the firm’s partner Elizabeth Wild.
In NSW the impact of climate catastrophe truly hit home in the Spring and Summer of 2019-20 when the state was engulfed by the Black Summer Fires which claimed 33 lives, destroyed more than 2,448 homes, and had an estimated $4.6billion economic impact countrywide.
“The 2019-20 Black Summer Bushfires were some of the worst in the world and in recorded history,” concluded Dave Owens APM and Mary O’Kane in their report to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry.
They visited 14 council areas of NSW from the Northern Rivers and Clarence Valley in the north to the Far South Coast and found, “We should expect fire seasons like 2019-20, or potentially worse, to happen again. Climate change, as a result of increased greenhouse gas emissions, clearly played a role in the conditions that led up to the fires and in the unrelenting conditions that supported the fires to spread.”
Government body AdaptNSW says the state is at high risk of bushfire, and this risk is increasing with climate change.
Figures from international environment and climate data authority Groundsure – using the Groundsure ClimateIndexTM – reveal The Blue Mountains with 1068 lots – or 48% of total lots – are facing a very high risk assessment of bushfire both now and 30 years into the future, followed by the Central Coast, Sutherland Shire, Wollongong and Wollondilly.
