As part of my efforts to contribute to public discourse on topics I research, I periodically contribute to media outlets and comment on current events.
For this ‘Rip guides’ piece, we publicised some preliminary findings from our drowning prevention fieldwork. Unfortunately, our fieldwork coincided with a summer ‘drowning crisis’. We received a lot of attention and numerous examples of feedback from the public with regard to the benefits of ‘two way’ engagements that focus on skill development over awareness raising.
In this ABC interview with Jonathan Green I had the opportunity to discuss structural flood mitigation. I was particularly keen to make the case – common within the academic literature but less accepted in public debates – that flood risk and damages materialize because of our collective values, rather than because of some error or malicious actors. Rather than a ‘villian’ in the story of flood risk, my argument is that it is much more complicated because we are, in both direct and indirect ways – complicit in the production of flood risk.
In this ABC interview, I speak about flood risk management and our reliance on ‘awarness raising’ (i.e., deficit model) when we attempt to reduce flood risk. In this discussion, I do my best to broaden how we think about the innumerable factors that contribute to flood disasters. For example, flooding is so much more than just climate change, also including land-use change, social change, economic change, and the amplification and inter-mingling of these processes. Broadly, I was hoping to challenge ‘how we know about flooding’.
In this piece, Tim Werner and I were keen to provide an Anstralian example of the Levee Effect. Tim has made a really impressive time-lapse map of encroachment into the floodplain near Lismore.
In this follow-up piece in the Conversation, I was responding to the palpable anger within flood-affected communities and the calls for better flood prevention. While understandable, I wanted to counter the inclination towards structural protection – it is uneconomical
Quotes in Media
The Age
Metro Tunnel among projects that may have exacerbated flood (Sophie Aubrey and Clay Lucas February 27, 2023)
Flood and fury: How the west was let down (Clay Lucas and Sophie Aubrey February 12, 2023)
‘Playing Russian roulette’: why development continues in flood zones (Cara Waters and Benjamin Preiss October 22, 2022)
Brian Cook's Research 