Monash Business School’s Green Lab is set to host their second roundtable: Extreme weather events, flood risk and stormwater systems on 13 February. These roundtables are held in collaboration with the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington D.C.
This roundtable will cover the impact of extreme weather events on stormwater systems and how prepared our existing systems are to cope. The roundtable will discuss and compare experience from Australia, the United States and Asia with leading academics and practitioners. As well as building comparative knowledge, the roundtables are intended to help navigate a pathway forward in the face of global temperature rise exceeding 2 degrees.
A Monash expert is available to talk about adaptation to extreme weather events and other impacts of climate change and how we prepare for those events.
Dr Michael Spencer, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Green Lab, Monash Business School
Contact: +61 3 9903 4840 or media@monash.edu
Read more of Dr Spencer’s commentary at Monash Lens
Comments attributable to Dr Michael Spencer:
“Climate change is a cost-of-living issue facing all Australians. Recent ABS CPI data shows that over the 12 months to December 2024, an 11 per cent rise in insurance costs was a major contributor to the rise in the cost of living measured by CPI. A contributor to insurance costs is loss and damage from extreme events. While the rate of increase moderated over 2024, it is expected to rise again following recent events.
“Loss and damage is what we are left with when we fail to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (mitigation) and fail to adequately adapt to the impact of a changing climate (adaptation). The 2025 Global Risks Report, released at the World Economic Forum, had extreme weather at the top of a list of long-term risks based on severity. It was second on the list of short-term risks after misinformation and disinformation.
“That is the nub of the problem. We know the impacts of extreme weather will be severe and costly. But we don’t know when. As we saw here in Australia with floods in NSW, you can have two extreme events in a month or none for decades. How do we deal with that? Australia, like most countries, has a poor record in putting in place measures to adapt to climate change; they can be expensive with unknown timelines and severity.
“That is the focus of the Monash Green Lab Living With 2°C Plus roundtables. In our second roundtable, we will look at extreme events that take the form of floods and how we prepare for those events in urban areas particularly, given experience from around the world that show urban stormwater systems are quickly overwhelmed leading to property inundation and sometimes worse.
“In Melbourne we are grappling with this problem. Work around Kensington and Yarra have highlighted the risk when houses had their flood zoning changed as a result of updated modelling. State and local governments facing financial constraints are reluctant to invest in future problems with so many unknowns. The problem gets pushed onto individual property owners through the planning system.”
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