What the world can learn from Australia's tragic flooding

Two big natural disasters hit this week: one in the rich world, one in the shanties of Brazil.

Usually I find myself deployed to cover floods or earthquakes in poor countries. Most recently, I spent a month in Pakistan last summer reporting on the plight of the 15-million people displaced by the Indus Valley floods.

On Wednesday I arrived in a half-drowned Brisbane to witness what a natural disaster can mean in a first world country.

It’s got me thinking…  particularly when I discovered that my reports from here were soon to be running alongside reportage from Rio. There, the numbers killed in floods and landslides have now topped 500. At least 14,000 people have been left completely homeless. Although 60 Queenslanders are still missing, the official death toll tonight stands at just 16.

The niggling, haunting question:  have we given too much attention to the Australian floods just because down here, down under, they are generally rich and white? Does our reporting, our judgements of what is newsworthy, reflect a hidden ethnic  or class prejudice?

The answer to both of these questions is a resounding “No.”  And here’s why.

More people die in poor countries when calamities strike because poor people are more vulnerable; their homes are usually flimsier, their location more precarious.  But professionals who deal with natural disasters don’t measure impact by the numbers killed.

Pakistan’s a good example. In 2005, 79,000 people died in the Kashmir Earthquake.  Last year, 2,000 died in the floods. And which was judged to be the biggest natural disaster? The floods – because of the numbers who survived. We journalists are often overly focused on what in short-hand journalese we call the “death toll.”

The impact of a disaster can in fact be felt more sharply in more developed countries simply because its victims just have more to lose. Poor people in poor countries may be more vulnerable, but they are also more resilient. In the rich world, people who own expensive houses and a couple of luxury cars don’t generally cope too well when a disaster washes them away and leaves them without things they take for granted – like electricity or water.

Today I took a helicopter ride up into Queensland’s stunningly beautiful Lokyer Valley, where the “inland tsunami” struck on Monday, after weeks of persistent rain.  It was a shocking sight:  houses washed two kilometers downstream, cars, trucks, littering the sprawling valley floor, where they’d been picked up by the wall of water which crashed into quiet rural communities.

Not at all dissimilar, in fact, to what I’d seen in Swat in northwest Pakistan last summer, where raging torrents coursed through narrow valleys, washing hundreds of homes away.

And Brisbane, like the cities of the lower Indus, had plenty of forewarning of the encroaching flood – which peaked here, on Thursday morning, inundating 35 surburbs and causing muddy misery. Believe me, the impact has been felt just as keenly here as it ever was in Sukkur in Sindh Province.

I spoke to an Australian disaster relief expert today, who for many years has headed UN disaster operations – including that 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.  Andrew MacLeod says there’s another reason why the world should pay attention to what happened here in Brisbane.

“It’s been a foretaste of the sort of natural calamaties we’re going to see more of in the future. Climate change is happening,” he said, “whether or not it’s naturally occurring or man-made. Many countries will find themselves on the frontline of wild weather – and because 80 per cent of Australians live along its coasts, this country is very vulnerable.”

“We need to respond to the fact that this is happening and in an increasingly urbanised world, we all need to be more more careful about where and how we build our houses.”

The upward trend of ocean temperatures has, in the Pacific, been exacerbated by the La Nina effect, which has sloshed more warm water across to the Australasian side.  This has has meant more moisture in the air – and, as Queenslanders have discovered, too much rain. If this trend continues, Mr MacLeod argues, cyclonic weather events in the southern hemisphere will move south (impacting with increasing frequency, cities such as Brisbane, and Sydney down the coast) and the hurricane belt will move north – putting urbanised North America at greater risk.

“Once in 100 year floods will become once in 90 year floods, then once in eighty year floods, and so on,” he says.  Thirty five years ago, the last time Brisbane flooded, its residents were told it would be a once-in-a-life-time event.  Now it’s a twice-in-a-lifetime event.

The question as to what to do about this issue will become deeply political as the 21st century progresses.  Riverside properties in Brisbane will likely lose their kudos, hilltop homes will be prime real estate. But what about the South Pacific islands, and Bangladesh, a third of which now floods dramatically almost every single year? There will come a point at which the world will have to contemplate relocating vast numbers of people.

And where exactly, on this already crowded planet, are they going to go? Queensland’s nice. And big. Although, it is, it seems, rather prone to natural disasters of its own. Ones the world can learn from – just as they Australian government says it intends to do.