James Davidson of JDA Co., is an architect who has been specialising in disaster-resilient retrofits and architectural design solutions for over 20 years. Davidson is joined by Nick Wiesener, head of Disaster Management Australia and insurance advisor to national government.

This interview, presented as a four-part series, documents their discussion covering government policy, social, economic and insurance issues surrounding the response to the issue of flooding to homes in Australia, and culminates in recommended building solutions.

This frank discussion aims to add to the wider dialogue among the architecture community in New Zealand, and further highlight the urgent need to take action in defending our homes and livelihoods against climate change.

Part 1 - The Australian response

Adrienne Miller (AM): James, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background and your thoughts on what New Zealand might learn from the Australian experience.

James Davidson (JD): To preface the discussion, I invited Nick [Wiesener] to join us today because he’s done a lot of pro bono work over the last 10 years and my perception of things (as an architect) could be slightly different to Nick’s. So he can talk from the insurance side, government side and the insurance-builder side. Also, we’ve been talking to James Solari (Solari Architects) for some time about bringing people over [to New Zealand] who’ve been in government here [in Australia], working in the Resilient Homes Fund, along with myself and Nick. We’re worried that decisions are going to be made in New Zealand that will have long term effects and impacts, so being able to speak to people who are making those decisions up front and early on after an event is critical. So I see this as the first step and it’s why I’m interested in participating in this conversation.

A bit about my background: I run JDA Co. that has been practicing for 14 years. I was in practice for about a year when the floods in 2011 happened in Brisbane, in south east Queensland. At the time I was also a director of a charity organisation called Emergency Architects Foundation — it’s a French foundation. We did a lot of bushfire work, a lot of cyclone work in the Pacific and tsunami work in Indonesia.

I’ve always had an interest in the power of architecture and in architectural critical thought to assist people who can’t normally afford an architect. Generally, as architects, we work for wealthy people, so the idea of getting involved in programmes that have a broader impact is what I’m interested in.

So far, we’ve been successful at building on the early work that we did 10 years ago. Within about a week after the 2022 floods — once the waters subsided — I chose to work only with uninsured homeowners in low socio-economic areas. All the overseas work had shown me that, while we might have the best intentions, we can be misguided when we’re in a different cultural context. So I put aside my interest in going to the Solomons to build toilets to focus on my own backyard, and that’s proved invaluable. We began by organising 60 architects and 100 students of architecture to team up in groups of three (two students to one architect) and we started offering our services pro bono to assist uninsured homeowners in how to build back. The learnings were then put into the private work we were doing for clients in flood-prone areas.

AM: So, as well as it being an altruistic and purpose-driven objective on your part, it ended up informing your general practice as well?

JD: Absolutely, although that wasn’t necessarily the original intent. What happened was, I made a big submission to the Commission of Inquiry — a floods commission inquiry based on the work we’d been doing — and lot of my recommendations got written into that report. After that, I started to become known for being an architect that didn’t just think about elevating homes — a costly exercise when you’re uninsured — because in those days there was a discrepancy in a lot of insurance policies around flooding and a lot of people weren’t actually insured when they thought they were.

AM: So even when they had insurance, it didn’t cover them in the event of flooding?

JD: Nowadays, generally, most people can access some form of flood insurance. But when working with private clients doing renovations for AUD$180,000, $220,000 — whatever they could scrape together — we started seeing a lot of issues in the building code around materials and what sort of things you could actually do in a flood-prone area. Also, in having to use private money — the last dollar somebody had — there was a lot of pressure to think around the appropriate use of materials. A lot of people would say, “look, we can’t afford to raise funds and we don’t actually believe in raising because, we don’t think that the levels are ever going to be the same again anyway. They could just keep getting worse. We’ve only got $80,000. What can we do?.” Having to find design solutions within a restricted budget sharpens your mind and forces you to use your ingenuity.

AM: Before we move on what you suggested to homeowners in that situation, it might be helpful to hear from Nick. Can you tell us about your background and your input with governmental guidance?

Nick Wiesener (NW): Certainly. I’m the head of Johns Lyng Disaster Management Australia, which is a subsidiary of the Johns Lyng Group, and the largest insurance builder in Australia, but we also have a presence in New Zealand, and in 18 states in the US. Through this role, I’ve been involved in the last 30 large disasters in Australia. For clarity, we consider a large disaster anything costing a couple of hundred million dollars up to multi-billion dollar events. In my previous role, I was responsible for managing the insurance industry response to natural disasters and I had a team that really changed the way that the insurance industry responds to disasters, making it far more proactive.

Johns Lyng played a key role in developing the industry advocacy piece around disaster risk reduction and resilience. We would go in after a disaster and (on behalf of industry), act as a conduit between the government insurance industry and the community. As part of our disaster response, we’d often promote insurance and try to educate around disaster risk reduction. So building back better.

In recent years — since the bushfires, essentially — the Australian Government has provided more funding towards building back better and disaster resilience. I’ve known James [Davidson] for quite a number of years now. The way that I think we complement each other is James has that design knowledge and experience in building, whereas my background is advising government on disaster risk reduction and helping design programmes or policies around disaster risk reduction. And now working with Disaster Management Australia, we partner with state governments and organisations to go out there and project-manage the delivery.

AM: You’ve already alluded to it, James, that the solution to flooding in terms of the built form is not always lifting properties and/or retreating the property. Can you tell us about the design response and the problems you were seeking to address in your built solution?

JD: If I break it down, the work we do in many instances is a band-aid solution to buy time to make better planning decisions longer-term. But, the critical thing is it’s an affordable approach to get people back in their homes as quickly as possible. That’s the goal. It’s finding the best ways to literally get people back in in their homes within days. We’ve had a couple of hundred properties now — previous to the 2022 floods — that flooded, and people were back in within a few days — up to two weeks. Their houses were cleaned up quickly so they could get on with their lives and start helping their community. So, the quicker and more cheaply we can do it, the better from my point of view.

It’s not for me to say whether people should be there in the first place; obviously, I do believe in retreat in certain instances, and in elevation in other instances. It’s all about what’s right for that family going forward. That’s essentially what it boils down to.

AM: So, this band-aid approach provides benefits from a human experience and community perspective and presumably reduces waste volumes as well?

JD: Yes, that’s a nice secondary outcome. My interest is more with the mental health issues that arise. With our current programme, we’ve done 5000 assessment reports for properties and you hear a lot of stories. My office alone did the first thousand or so reports and — the social disruption — it’s terrible. If this continues happening, entire societies will start to become weaker because people have had enough of going through the same old thing, again and again and again. Nobody believes that it’s going to be another 100 years before this happens again. That conversation has gone.

AM: So for you, the social and mental health issues that arise as a result of a natural disaster are a main driver for your work in disaster recovery. In New Zealand we’ve seen PTSD as a result of the Christchurch earthquakes and the post-earthquake recovery. You also mentioned the cost factor. What is the problem we’re seeking to address here from an insurance perspective Nick?

NW: We are seeing an increasing incidence of extreme weather events that our built environments have not been constructed to withstand. That is the successive issue that we’re seeing across Australia. Whether it’s in far north Queensland with flood and cyclone risks, the West Coast with cyclone risks, and in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia — now with flood risk as well. We just haven’t built our environment to withstand those increasingly-strong weather events.

I was in Townsville a couple of years ago when we had a number of floods come through there. One particularly bad flood occurred between late January and early February 2019. I saw a new housing development (mid-construction) that had been built on reclaimed land on the Ross River that had water up to the rooftops.

That development should never have been built there. The developers got around land use planning using outdated maps that hadn’t factored in the increasing flood risk. You had hundreds of residents that just recently bought those homes — many that were destroyed or severely damaged.

The other aspect is insurance affordability. That’s a key driver that’s sitting behind a lot of the resilience or risk reduction work that Australia is doing, because we are increasingly seeing communities that are on the verge of being uninsurable under the private insurance model here. The problem is, once you have more and more homes becoming uninsurable, or sections of a community becoming uninsurable, people are stuck there. They can’t sell their properties, they can’t get insurance, people aren’t buying there, local businesses can’t sell, they can’t get loans, they can’t expand their business, and you end up with a community in economic and social decline.

That’s a particular risk for Lismore. It’s the ‘canary in the coal mine’ at the moment which sits behind some of the Federal Government and State Government funding for recovery and providing the Resilient Homes Fund. It’s not just flood risk. We’re seeing the same in north Queensland with cyclone risk. And in QLD, we’re again seeing our Federal Government and State Governments putting more and more funding towards retrofitting homes, retrofitting strata buildings, to ensure that people can afford insurance and that insurance is still available. I know in New Zealand there’s the EQC, which is set up as a re-insurance facility through the Government, which does obscure some of those affordability issues.

AM: The EQC doesn’t obscure the affordability issues completely…

NM: In terms of insurance affordability — although Australia is a little further down that unfortunate path — New Zealand is not too far behind. In engaging early and building out a resilience model by retrofitting homes to reduce the disaster risk, you can avoid communities lapsing into a space where they just cannot afford insurance.

It also creates a huge risk for Government, as we’ve seen in other places in the world where communities have become uninsurable. A disaster will come through and create a huge social and economic dilemma for Government, where they then need to step in and fund that entire recovery.

It then creates a moral risk, where other communities that might be paying significant amounts in insurance each year see Government stepping in and providing support or a bailout, and it provides incentive for people to say: “Well, I don’t need to buy insurance either because the people down the road didn’t have it and Government funded their recovery”. We’re seeing this on a smaller level in Australia, where Government is providing financial support for residents who didn’t have insurance and that’s causing some social frustrations within those communities.

AM: Presumably too, there’s a risk, at an institutional level for local Government or state-level Government, of future expectations.

NM: Investing in disaster risk reduction now is really about staving off much more significant financial consequences in the future. You often see numbers bandied around with a dollar spent in disaster risk reduction saves $4.00, $7.00 or $11.00 (AUD) in disaster recovery.

Read: Flood resilient architecture: Part 2 - The Australian response