The social impact of climate change

I'm teaching Social Impact Assessmentat RMIT again this semester. I decided to offer a choice for the group work assignment. The two most popular ideas were an international development project and the social impact of climate change. In order to 'make it personal', I decided to use a case study of looking at the potential social impact of climate change in a specific community which may be vulnerable. I chose Barwon Heads/Ocean Grove because I did some work there a couple of years ago and know the area reasonably well. The students doing this assignment were very enthusiastic and it will be interesting to see how they scope out the impacts. The international project the rest of the class is doing is the Three Gorges Dam in China. Mostly because there was lots of information available, but also because the sheer scale of impact is almost unimaginable - over a million people displaced, just to start with.

When you're talking about abstract issues like pollution and so on, it's difficult for people to get enthusiastic. There's a tendency to not want to be out there doing more than anyone else - in other words no one wants to sacrifice more than their neighbour, or shoulder an unfair share of the burden. It's human nature. But in some ways it becomes even harder when you get down to specifics. For example, many coastal towns in Australia are in low-lying areas. Even with sea-level rise projections at the lower end of the scale, parts of these towns are at risk of inundation.

So who is responsible for managing these impacts? A specific case is impacts on houses built in areas at risk of inundation. What happens if government modelling shows these properties to be unsafe and at risk of inundation? Does the government then become liable to help these people relocate, or do they have to pay for adaptation strategies, such as sea walls? I can see a time coming when it may be necessary to compulsorily acquire some properties for public safety reasons, and becuase the owners wouldn't be able to sell them any other way.

This issue has already arisen in Victoria, where a couple of coastal Councils have had kand rezoned to prevent construction on the basis of unacceptable risk of sea level rise. The land immediately became worthless and the owners were justifiably angry at their financial loss. The mechanisms for retreating from low-lying coastal areas need considerable thought in the very near future, to ensure that appropriate and equitable systems are in place.