What have we learned in the last ten years in planning and implementing flood resilience measures?

What has been each practioners focus over the last 10 years?

When the the 2010/11 floods occurred each one of us would have had their own unique experience at time.

And over the last 8 years our Flood Community of Practice collective have all been exposed to a wide range of:

  • principles
  • frameworks
  • shared experiences with colleagues

Though when you talk to colleagues, and ask what it was that really allowed change and truly NOT business of usual approaches to proceed then the story is fascinating.

So that is what we did at this event where we had:

Paul Hart  – was part of a Dutch consortium offering support and engagement post 2011 floods

Graeme Milligan – seconded into the Qld Reconstruction Authority in January 2011 and championed the resilience based thinking

Simone De Kleermaeker – part of the Deltares team that has been working in Queensland since the floods

James Davidson – local architect, who saw the raw damage first hand in early 2011 and has evolved has practice to help householders better adapt to flood impacts

Paul Sayers – UK flood risk specialist who visited Brisbane in 2012 in a small UK delegation to run a joint knowledge sharing seminar

Gregor van Essen – a Dutch engagement specialist who ran 3 early career events to develop fresh ideas and practical tolls for dealing with floods and resilience building

Steven Trewhella – part of the original Dutch consortium and subsequently has maintained ongoing links with various Queenslander flood resilience initiatives

The Context

Since the state wide floods of 2010/11, Queensland practioners have been working on a diversity of aspects in flood resilience – planning, engagement, modelling, strategy development, planning scheme redesign and amendments, upgrades, detail design, implementation programs, evaluation, communication etc.

The flooding impacts that occurred were so widespread and at a magnitude more severe than previously experienced that the demand on responsible agencies and professionals to step forward and do sometime different was considerable. This has been a moment where Business as Usual needed to change.

Event Focus

  • So with the benefit of hindsight what has influenced the way the various professional practioners have thought and gone about their various roles and responsibilities over the last 10 years??

Was it:

  • Past approaches and what you learnt at University?
  • Experiences and ideas from overseas?
  • National directions?
  • Local adaptation and home grown thinking?

What were

  • the areas of influences,
  • the frameworks or principles underpinned the thinking and
  • who were the types of other practioners that have influenced our thinking and practices??

In promoting the event – we had a fun video that visualized why coming together was vita.  Click here to see the clip.

SO WHAT DID WE DO AND HOW/WHAT DID WE LEARN WAS A FOCUS OF THE DISCUSSION

Highlights from each of the speakers – compliments from our Chief Doodler – Hayley Langsdorf

Two summary visual compilations from the day rounds of the event – clearly bring together some key learnings.  Once again compliments of Thought Drawn Out

Bonus additional video of the whole day

Watch as Hayley builds the various highlights as the session progressed in this video clip – click here 

Many thanks to all the participants, our speakers from Brisbane, Sydney the UK and The Netherlands.

There is a 90 minute long video recording and if you would like to see that – please email p.filet@griffith.edu.au to seek that access.