G’day everyone, and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations I’m Benjamin Law. Today is number 43 of 100 conversations happening every Friday at the Powerhouse museum and online, which presents 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is of course climate change. Now we’re recording this today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum and before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. So, it’s in this context and in the belly of this industrial artefact that we shift our focus towards the innovations of the net zero revolution.

We’re really grateful to be having this conversation today on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years, and together these First Nations constitute the oldest continuing civilisation the planet has ever known. First Nations people are the world’s first scientists, engineers, agriculturalists and mathematicians, and they mastered how to live sustainably on such a dry continent, which is something that, of course, we’re struggling to do now. So, we’re so grateful to Elders, past and present, that we can continue sharing knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal land.

Our guest today is a global expert in sustainable cities and regions, smart infrastructure, coastal planning, climate change adaptation and urban governance. She’s emeritus professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Canberra and a visiting fellow at the ANU in Canberra. She’s also a director at Urban Climate Change Research Network Oceania Hub, co-chair of Planners for Climate Action. And she’s also just released her book, Urban Planning for Climate Change. Can you please join me in welcoming Professor Barbara Norman?

Thank you, Ben.

Now, Professor, I have to admit from the outset, I’m a bit of an urban planning nerd. I don’t work in your realm, but I’m really fascinated about how places, especially cities, are built, how they are planned, and how they’re supposed to evolve, and I can kind of trace my interest back to maybe visiting the big cities like Hong Kong at the time as a child and being completely overwhelmed by how a place even existed. When you go back, looking back, where did your interest, your personal passion in urban planning and development come from?

I go right back to my teenage years, I grew up on the urban fringe of Melbourne, a place called Eltham. It’s quite developed now, but it was almost a bohemian lifestyle, it was full of great artists, Cliff Pugh, all those people around there, mud brick houses, and so I grew up in that kind of environment, which I loved very much. And grew up in a mud brick house where you had to go outside to go from one room to the other, so it was very connected to nature through that period. But I used to have to catch the school bus further into the suburbs, and I could see each year the suburbs coming out towards where I live, thinking, Help, here they come. And I was just really struck even at that young age, 15, 16, 17, that perhaps we could do better, and I could see that these beautiful orchards were being demolished for suburbia and the McMansions coming towards me, so that’s where it started.

The other part of that, of course, was I finished year 12 in 1974, Whitlam had come in. Whitlam was sort of big planning, spatial planning, Tom Uren is then the Federal Minister for the Department of Urban and Regional Development. And so it was very much in vogue, it was kind of a national priority around planning, which might seem a bit strange today, but that’s the way it was. And so when it came to the end of year 12, I had to choose something at university and I flicked through the book and I saw planning. That’s what I want to do. And so, I went and did a Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning at Melbourne at the time.

So, after you graduate, your first job, correct me if I’m wrong, is working in the Upper Yarra Valley at the Dandenong Regional Authority, where you’re on the ground and you’re doing field work with people on the ground, with farmers, with landowners. I imagine there’s a lot of competing kind of desires and different stakeholders that you need to manage. I mean, this is a situation in which so many people find themselves when dealing within the realm of climate change, what were the competing kind of needs of these people?

Well, definitely at that stage it was about the expanding urban fringe of Melbourne into the Yarra Valley. And it might be hard to believe it today, but there wasn’t the thriving wine industry that there is today. There was years ago and then they had this virus that went through and wiped it out in fact, but that’s like 100 years ago. But the expanding pressure from developers to expand the urban fringe, a political pressure to do that, and so we developed a regional plan and I still think it was one of the best regional plans that has been developed. This is just not me, it’s stood the test of time and I’ll explain very quickly why.

It developed a strategy that enabled farmers there to have a viable future that was of the same economic benefit as if they were developing houses, if that makes sense. So, the vineyard industry we put in control, so good agricultural land would be protected. That the vineyard industry was able to establish itself properly and then become sufficiently successful to a point where today no one would even dream about developing that land. It’s a thriving, economically successful tourism region that is still very beautiful. And the towns containing the development of those country towns, within their footprint to make sure they weren’t spreading out into that good agricultural land. I think in many ways that have very strong sustainability principles; we probably didn’t use that language. It was more about good land use management.

I’ve loved hearing about your work with agriculture, with farming land in the country, let’s completely flip that because then later on you’re working really in the urban centre of things, right? So, early in your career you actually helped really build the Melbourne that we recognise today, transforming the inner city from industrial railway yards. And I think there’s a good opportunity to discuss what good planning can do in terms of revitalising communities, revitalising the use of land. Lead us through that process of creating what we now know is Melbourne’s CBD and how urban planning, when it’s done well, can create something completely new.

So, my next role was in fact with the Department of Planning in Victoria, in central Melbourne, and in fact I was the first Southbank officer, and you know Southbank today, how developed it is in the cultural centre, well none of that existed.

What was there?

And we didn’t even know who owned the land actually. It was just disused railways and quite a mess, and Melbourne had not really discovered that side of the river at that point. And so, my job again in my early 20s, was to just simply do an audit of the landscape and then provide a report as to what are the possibilities for this area. This is under the leadership of David Yencken who was head of the department at the time, and Evan Walker, who was the minister and they’re both really visionary people in my view and fostered, encouraged young people like myself to come up with creative ideas so it was a really excellent time.

I also did a housing study at that time, and it might surprise you that I was able to actually walk through each of the housing places, there was less than a thousand people living in the CBD at the time. And of course, today it’s completely transformed, it continues to grow but it was a very big conversation at the time about do we grow out or do we grow up? And definitely from an urban planning perspective and sustainability perspective, still today is, if you can get the design right – and that’s an important thing – growing up, containment, consolidation is a much better strategy than expanding out into what I described before as good agricultural lands, into our forests, into our hinterland. And with climate change, of course, expanding into flood risk areas, into high fire risk areas.

So, we’ve got a lot more considerations today. That was the big discussion, there were huge debates, professionally, there were huge debates about do we go out or do we go up. But the government at the time under John Cain came to a landing that we intensify, and we consolidate and then the next question was what do we do with central Melbourne? And clearly there was a huge opportunity to be able to bring people back into town.

Because there can be an assumption sometimes that big, dense cities may be a more environmentally disastrous way to live because they’re busy, there’s so many people there, you know, these are engines of industry as well. Just by sheer population alone in such a tight space. What’s the reality?

Well, let me give you an example, Singapore, is an example I know well. Singapore for really since 1950/60 decided that they wanted to become a really sustainable city. Now it is densely populated and of course, a lot more today than it was then. Their leader at the time, Lee Kuan Yew, unusually said, and I’ve documented this in one of my books, ‘any major development must be signed off by the head of parks.’ This is like 50, 60 years ago. And that kind of philosophy has continued on and so they talk about Singapore as a biophilic city, and so it is a green city in every sense.

The buildings, water retention, and they have to do that now. They’re really focussed on that now because something like 80 to 90 per cent of their water comes from Malaysia and they realise that in the drying world water is like the new gold and so they need to be much smarter about how they retain water. And they’ve got a fantastic public transport system. And if you’ve been to Singapore, or walked around Singapore, you can feel it, can’t you. All the streets are green, there’s landscape, there’s trees, there’s water reticulation, as I say, and very good transport system. So, you know, it can be done very successfully.

I’m often asked this question about how we accommodate our growing populations and in Australia we’re expected to go from 20, I think we’re 25, nearly 26 million now, to 40 million by 2050. So, it’s taken us a long time to get to this point, a very short time to get to 40 million. People say, ‘Oh, we better shut the gate, no more growing of population.’ But I don’t agree with that. It’s how we do things. We will continue to grow. You can have 200,000 people behaving very unsustainably and you can have another 200,000 practice sustainability and I think it’s more about how we approach it.

We’re talking in a period right now where there’s pretty heavy flooding in parts of New South Wales and Victoria. Some of these communities have experienced floods before, some of them will continue later on. Can you take us through how the climate crisis and climate disasters, the changing kind of landscape and reality which we now face, is going to redraw the urban landscape. What sort of climate impacts do urban planners need to be taking into account, given the future that we face?

So, I think there’s a couple of things here first. Community attitudes and awareness has changed dramatically. My own experience talking about these issues 20 years ago, I’d be on the front page of the national press as an extremist. Saying that something simple as ‘perhaps we could consider stepping back from the coastal edge,’ drama. You know, literally. I gave a speech in Darwin and by the time I got to Adelaide it was the number one national news, this is around 2005. Today people say to me, ‘Well, that makes common sense.’ And as if I had – it’s nothing new what I was saying and I think, Oh, that’s good I’m really pleased they finally caught up it’s like so –

And so is the difference, you know, what used to be seen as potentially paranoia or fear mongering is like, well, we’ve all seen the photos of coastal communities and erosion taking place.

So, now people want to immediately talk to me about solutions. How can we work together? How can you help us to work together to find some solutions? So, that has really changed. The other side is the planning profession and the decision makers, if you like. In my view, we need to make climate change a mandatory consideration in all land use planning in Australia. And it’s one thing to say that, it’s another to implement it. And it has implications for, for example, the training of urban planners. Most urban planners have never had any training in climate change. That’s in the science faculty, not in the architecture faculty. And so, we need to break down those barriers and have our planners experiencing some of the basic understandings of science, have our scientists understand some basics around land use planning, decision making, so a more integrated approach in education so there’s that as well.

And tell me about where the discourse is at at the moment, because when it comes to conversations about urban planning and climate change, how much of it is about how do we plan new places for the future, and how much of it is about retrofitting what we already have?

That’s a really important question because a lot of the focus is on the new development. But in fact, that’s actually quite a small percentage of our development that occurs each year. And if cities like, for example, Copenhagen have decided that their main objective is about retrofitting. Retrofit the whole city. In their case, it’s about flood proofing. They have won a national – global award actually, there’s a plan called Cloudburst to completely redesign their drainage systems and retrofit their building infrastructure.

So, I think a lot of the discussion, not enough, actually, but most of the discussion that there is around the urban fringe of new developments. How do we build a net zero carbon house, for example, or an office building, but not about how do we how do we provide examples to everyone who is living in the suburbs, for example. A boring suburban house, how do we retrofit that to be net zero carbon and adapted to the impacts of climate change? We need to achieve both objectives at once.

What does that actually look like?

Okay, well, I’m not an architect, so I might not get into that detail, I mean I can give you some advice –

Maybe looking at the towns themselves –

Looking at the town itself, implementing what we call water sensitive urban design. So instead of the drains, the kind of the concrete channels that you still see in cities that we have natural watercourses with wetlands that are created, that have very smart drainage underneath it, but not only make the city more beautiful, but retain water naturally within those environments. In really concrete landscapes like Los Angeles, they’re punching holes in the concrete all the way through now, putting in pocket parks just to bring that ability to retain water naturally within the environment so it’s not flowing through fast. Not having this concrete landscape, if you like, that we’ve created in urban environments where the water’s got nowhere to go, and that’s why we get these flash floods. And, you know, in Los Angeles, they they’re actually going to try and restore the river there, well, that would be a huge achievement there if you’ve ever seen it.

So, taking our water sensitive urban design, taking a catchment management approach, so looking beyond the urban environment and how we can retain water and in the forests and ecosystems before it comes into the city. It’s taking that more holistic perspective. Rather than just putting a dam in and putting in concrete channels and where does the water go?

So that’s about retrofitting the places that already exist, which is where the majority of us live and will continue to live. You say that new developments and new planning will be a smaller slice of the pie, but at the same time, it’s interesting to talk about because when we’re talking about building a place, a community from the ground up, here in Australia, given all of the realities we face, what does better urban planning look like for the future?

Well, of course, we have a very diverse landscape in this country, so I could say we can’t have one solution, but I can give you some basic principles. I think in terms of climate change, we need to get much better at mapping the risks. That might sound really basic, but in this country we haven’t done it properly yet. And identifying what the impacts will be. Embedding the latest climate science from the IPCC scenarios, what if there’s half a metre sea level rise? What if there’s one, what if there is one and a half? What if there’s two? So, what are the implications for where we place development and how we build in the future? Same with the fire risks. Some places will be too hot to live. Mildura is already hot for example, it will be very hot. So, mapping the risks is the first thing.

The second thing is we need to involve the community much more in the conversation. A lot of communities now, quite – because of recent events – quite fearful about the future and quite legitimately so. And so the Biden administration just in September announced as part of a big package, a national climate portal. And that might sound grand but have a look at it. You can go in and put your suburb in, your locality. It’s got two different scenarios for the IPCC. It’s got a whole lot of data already there. So, it’s a national portal, but it’s very localised. I’d like to see that happen in this country so, in terms of planning new towns involving communities, we have much better data. Much better information for communities on climate for them to be able to use.

And then of course, involving our First Nations people and Indigenous communities in planning, I think is really, really fundamental. I reflect, I was national president of the Planning Institute of Australia and I’ve always been really concerned about how few First Nations people we have in the profession. And so, we’re still sending out our white planners to Indigenous communities, you know, good people to work, but would be much better where that had our trained Indigenous leaders going out and working with their communities about planning the future. And so, I think that’s really vital.

The final point is that when it comes to building new towns, we’ve really short-changed what we call strategic planning, forward planning in recent years. So, I talked about Whitlam and the big planning ideas, he had a big mind, a big understanding of the one nation, one country, and we need to sort out where our urban growth should be in the future and what that means for infrastructure and housing affordability and the environment, all those sorts of issues. A lot of that was lost, in my view, during the 90s and what we call ‘the noughties’. And so, I think we’re bearing some of the consequences of that in the last couple of decades today.

And the good news is I see a resurgence starting a little bit in Australia just with a new government nationally, but definitely in the UK and Europe. In the US, typically California and New York states, East Coast, West Coast, a resurgence to good forward strategic planning. The benefits of where do we grow in the future? How do we grow? Where do we not place development? And in the context of climate change, the American Planning Association has extremely strong language now and even I was surprised I’ve written about this in my book. Not only are they saying ‘planners must consider climate change,’ they’re saying ‘planners should be advocating, strong advocates.’ That’s unusual for a profession, strong advocates to encourage governments to take action on climate change. So, the language has changed.

Our friends in New Zealand, they’ve just put out their new climate change adaptation plan, I encourage people to look at that and I think that’s world leading practise. Obviously fully engaging the Māori community as they always have, but just really tackling the tough issues of coastal development, of sustainability, marine environment as well.

You’ve also been talking about a few snapshots overseas as well, what different jurisdictions in the United States are doing, New Zealand, too. So, let’s broaden the conversation because of course, it is a global conversation. You’re an author on the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report for Working Group Five. First of all, I’d like to know what is Working Group Five and what was the big message in the report?

So IPPC has produced a series of reports and you’ll see they just a number them, it’s a bit like the COPs, you know COP 27. So, this year and the last 12 months they produced their last set of reports which are number six series. So, the number five series came in 2013-14. And so, I was a contributing author to that and I’ve been a reviewer of this one, series six. Series five really was focussed on confirming the science around climate change at that point as it’s hard to remember, but it was still extremely controversial at the time.

And scientists, because they’re scientists, would say things like we’re 99.9 per cent sure but we’re not quite sure about the last 0.11 whatever. And people said, ‘There you go, you don’t know’. Whereas with economists they say 60 or 70 per cent and we all go and invest. So, they get a very hard time. The beauty of the last one, this most recent one, IPCC six, is that the urban agenda has come through very strongly. The planning agenda has come – I’ve never seen the language being used around planning as I am seeing in these reports. Simply, Cop 26, which was last year in the Glasgow communique that came out, it specifically mentioned planning, it’s only six pages long and it talks about climate adaptation of planning at all levels of government: national, regional and local.

You talk about your book that’s just about to be launched in Canberra very, very soon and we’ve already covered some of the principles that you outline in the book. So, you talk about the need to map out a climate risk assessment and overlay that with current and future development. What needs to happen next? I mean, what does it actually look like to map out climate risk? And is that something that any of the states have done so far at all?

Well, they have to more or less a degree, and it tends to be around specific issues, like they might have mapped the coastal edge. And I gave a talk to the Sydney Coastal Councils yesterday in fact. It’s falling on to, quite often, to local governments that don’t have the resources. The big ones were okay, but smaller councils all commissioning their own work, trying to work out what the risks are. And this is crazy, really, some of this is a consequence of the cuts to the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, the funding cuts over the last 10 years. And I seriously hope that will be restored soon because they have the capacity to do fantastic work in partnership with these local councils, and they have very much in the past.

We’ve had something like 25 national reports and enquiries into coastal management in Australia, this is an example. All of which have called for a national coastal strategy and all of whom have asked for a national coastal strategy to help local governments deal with these issues. So, I think mapping the risk sounds straightforward, but we need to reinvest back in our national science organisations on the one hand, but also have a funding stream to local governments around adaptation. And I am arguing this strongly right now, a national climate change adaptation program for local government to be able to invest in the strategic planning I’m talking about, to be able to bring in some of those scientists that they need to look at local conditions.

Downscaling, and the scientists will say this to you, downscaling national science to local has its risks. It can only come down so far, if you like. It can give you a picture of what might be happening in your local area, but it needs to be informed by local data as well and local experience. Even just local people saying, ‘Well, you might tell me that, but I know because I’ve been living here for 50 years that that doesn’t happen here.’ So, I think it’s both.

So when we talk about risk, we talk about adaptation, those words imply things that are on the horizon, things on the future that we need to actually help with now. But when you look at, say, a case study like Lismore, a township that has been hammered repeatedly by floods. To what extent can urban planning, retrofitting the things that we’ve been talking about actually help Lismore, or is it at the stage where we need to start talking about concepts like climate resettlement?

So I have dedicated a specific chapter in my new book on climate induced resettlement. It’s a global issue. In doing my research around the world, I was really taken aback by quite staggering figures that are estimated by the OECD, the World Bank and others of climate refugees, climate induced resettlement. In the not-too-distant future, by 2050, millions, millions. And we’re not divorced from that, and our region certainly isn’t. Or even Jakarta, for example, is sinking on the one hand and with climate impacts in the future, inundation. So the Indonesian government’s just passed the national law saying they have to move Jakarta, which has a population about the same as Australia. So, this is real. So, it’s not about the distance, it’s not even about the ‘if’, it is now, right? The people of Lismore can see that.

We have learnt quite a lot, it’s not like we haven’t moved towns in Australia before, with the Snowy Hydro we moved towns, we’ve built mining towns, we actually know how to do this. But it’s more about, from the community’s perspective, what they want. People of Grantham in Queensland after the floods up there, they decided to move after, I think a very good consultation process. The Queensland Reconstruction Authority was established at the time. I think it was 2011 and worked with the community, community elected themselves to move up the hill and I think about 90 per cent did. And in the recent floods they were protected. So, there’s a very recent example of a successful climate induced resettlement program.

Lismore is still going through the shock of the floods, and it will require a similar conversation with them and a dedicated team. It doesn’t mean that you have to move the whole town, and this is where it comes down to detail. Some places may be able to stay, some may be able to be adapted, and some, realistically, will have to go. And I think you can have some principles around that, fairness and equity and possible places to go to. But it does in this case, it does require support from the national government and state government, but it does require, I think, local solutions.

There are other considerations, cultural considerations, too. So, in the Pacific, for example, a deep connection to Country and First Nations people in Australia, Māori people in New Zealand. It’s not just about moving from one place to another. It’s where their histories, their stories, their ancestry, their belongings. Spiritual connection –

It’s home.

It’s home. And so, in some parts of the Pacific, they won’t even talk about it. Even though they can see it’s going to happen, it’s like –

Because it’s too painful?

It’s too painful, yes. So, I think as we approach these issues, we need to start a national conversation around it. I think we need to be involving our conversation with our wider region, sharing experience and knowledge and doing it when we’re not in a crisis. So that, when the inevitable – and I do use that word – inevitable happens, people are ready. They’ve had that conversation already. And that takes a lot of the fear out of this. I think climate induced resettlement is possibly one of the biggest social issues of the 21st century.

You mentioned that when it comes to solutions around, say, resettlement, it has to come down to notions of fairness. And it reminds me of a phrase that often comes up in your work is common good.

Yes.

And I’m really interested in that phrase, because I think it has – it’s related to these notions of fairness that you’re talking about. Define what you mean by common good and its relationship to these concepts of urban planning we’ve been discussing.

That’s always driven my work, actually. I’m not sure where it’s come from. I had a conversation with my mother about this recently. She’s nearly 99, fit and able and still swims in the ocean three times a week and, incredible. And my father died when I was about two. And so, my mum – and have a think about this – in the 50s, left with six children under 12 on her own and the family business to run to bring us up. Social security wasn’t necessarily that supportive to single mums at the time. I think a lot of it was driven from that experience. My father was very active on Melbourne City Council and a philanthropist as well. My mother was ended up on council – there has always been a – in fact all my brothers, I’m one of seven, all my brothers and sisters. I think when I think about what they do from one brilliant astrophysicist, my oldest brother set up the Hubble Telescope, to teachers to, we have all sorts of people in our family.

If we’re not committed to the common good, what are what are we on about, basically? If we’re not committed to leaving this place and this environment and this country in a better place by the time we leave, well, what is the legacy? It’s a one of selfishness. But what contribution has that made to a better place? And also, I probably haven’t mentioned that I was housing commissioner in the ACT, I was director of planning and housing commissioner somewhere amongst all that, and that gave me a much deeper understanding of generational inequality and the need to provide people with the opportunity to break that cycle. So, I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s driven me and it’s kept my passion about my work. I’m as passionate about my work in my mid-60s as I was as a teenager, and that makes for a good life.

Thank you so much for your time, and could you please join me in thanking our wonderful guest today, Professor Barbara Norman.

You can follow the programme online, you can listen to watch conversations with climate leaders, including Oz Harvest founder Ronni Kahn, former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, businessman, activist shareholder Mike Cannon-Brookes and Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe and so many more. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit 100climateconversations.com. And of course, you’ll find details about how to join a live recording too, bring your friends and we’ll see you next time. Thank you so much.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.