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One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

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Watching for progress on Wooli’s Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP) canone step, two steps be frustrating. Just to refresh your memory, here are the main steps so far:

That’s when the ‘one step back’ happened. The  CZMP proposed to get half the sand needed to nourish the village dunes from the national park behind Wilsons Headland. NSW National Parks department rejected that idea meaning the CZMP would not be approved.

Now for the two steps forward.

Firstly, Council are to be congratulated  for promptly approving an adjustment to the plan which retains beach nourishment to protect the dunes but uses a different approach to get the needed sand. The northern end of Wooli beach will continue to provide about half the sand originally planned for, but will do so every 2.5 years rather than every 5 years (depending on availability and need).

Secondly, Council added to the revised plan a proposal from CCPA to investigate beach scraping as a way to supplement the sand supply from north Wooli. Thanks to members Brian Saye (surveyor) and Bob Stack (engineer) for their Submissions which formed the basis for our proposal.

Finally, a couple of cautions about the Plan’s likely successsuccess_what_people_think_it_looks_like. Agreement will be needed from the Departments of Land and Marine Parks to take sand from north Wooli before this revised CZMP is likely to be approved by the Minister. Also state government approval of Council’s funding application is needed in order to get the plan started. Guarded optimism would be a fair summary.

6 out of 10 ain’t bad, but..

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We wanted to make sure you didn’t miss last week’s article in the Daily Examiner about the new Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP) for Wooli

It begins “Clarence Valley Council’s back-flip on its original plan to deal with rising sea levels at Wooli has won a 6 out of 10 score from residents”.

As Meatloaf sang (well almost), 6 out of 10 ain’t bad. It’s a big improvement on the zero the community gave the 2010 Plan.

Here’s the complete DEX article.

The Wooli community showed how seriously it takes this CZMP, and how closely it will be watching its progress. A deluge of  72 submissions containing about 300 pages was received by Council.This submission illustrates many of the points raised by the community.

A summary of our submissions will accompany the CZMP to a full meeting of Council on June 23 before the final version goes to the NSW Environment Minister by June 30.

 

The Proof will be in the (Minister’s) Pudding

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NSW Environment Minister Rob Stokes hasn’t been in his job long but is already making waves for coastal communities.

 

 

Our sympathies go out to the community at Old Bar (near Taree) faced with not only  a major erosion problem but now the Minister’s recent decision to reject their council’s proposal for a protective rock wall.

With a $50 million price tag this wall was always going to be a tough sell.

But for the Old Bar and Taree-coast communities this latest report in their local paper about the Minister’s alternative proposal of Planned Retreat for the whole of the Taree coastline was every bit as tough.

 

The community at Lake Cathie, an hour’s drive north of Old Bar, must be monitoring these developments closely as their own coastal erosion decision looms. As you can see from this report Minister Stokes has clearly said (my italics not his)

“….the community should not see the Old Bar decision as a precedent. “The whole point of our approach to coastal erosion and integrated coastal management is that every embayment [coastline recess] is different,…..the government would make decisions based on rational evidence and a thorough assessment of the environmental, social and economic consequences of the plans which councils put forward.”

 

In fact, it’s a fair bet that residents all along the NSW coast will be watching the Minister’s impending decision for  Lake Cathie to see if he is true to his words. Will Lake Cathie get a decision based on rational evidence or will this decision be another plank in a policy of planned-retreat-by-stealth? As always with politicians, the proof of the pudding will be in his actions not his words.

 

 

“..jump away from that doomsday scenario.”

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The title of this article is part of a  recent quote from Brad Hazzard, NSW Minister for the Department of Planning and Infrastructure,

“The problem that property owners face is that some councils have been casting potential longer-term issues as a clear-and-present danger,” Mr Hazzard said.  “We just need to get councils to jump away from that doomsday scenario.”

Minister Hazzard was quoted as part of a story in The Australian entitled  “Climate Doomsday powers to be eroded”. This story highlights the State government’s revised planning directions to councils.

CCPA-Wooli members may recall from our last article,Backwards or Forwards, that Wyong Council has decided to follow State advice and “jump away from the doomsday scenario” in their coastal planning. Unfortunately, as you’ll see in that article Clarence Valley Council (CVC) continues to treat 86-year modelling forecasts as clear-and-present-danger in their Coastal Zone Management Plans, including the one for Wooli beach. Comparing the beach today to the dire forecast in this clipping from the Daily Examiner in 1997 indicates the difficulty of forecasting out even 17 years, much less 86.

 

Coastal Hotspot communities understand that coastal management is a complex problem for all our councils and one they are struggling to manage as highlighted in this recent report in the Byron Bay Echo (thanks to our CCPA member Ian Oelrichs for sending it in).

CCPA-Wooli is continuing to work with CVC, the relevant State government departments and the Hotspot community groups to pull together to  find a balanced solution.

Backwards or Forwards?

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Coastal Zone Management Plans (CZMP ‘s) have been a can of worms for local councils and coastal communities alike.

Wooli ‘s 2010 draft CZMP presented by CVC used sea level rise predictions from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. These forecast rises of between 0.4m and 0.9m by 2100 and raised the spectre of “planned retreat” as a very real threat to much of Wooli ‘s property.

Since then, CCPA has worked doggedly to remove the “planned retreat” option from the draft Wooli CZMP.

 

So it was surprising to note an inclusion in  the tender document recently released by CVC for consultants wishing to prepare a draft CZMP for Whiting Beach at Yamba. This inclusion  instructs those tendering to use IPCC figures as a basis for their reports the very same figures that led to the confusion and insecurity that accompanied the appearance of the contentious “planned retreat” threat.

While we understand that the previous state government compelled local councils to use these figures back in 2010, it appears that CVC is reluctant to disregard them when drafting current CZMP ‘s, despite some convincing grounds for doubt informing the debate.

 

Available evidence raises legitimate arguments that counter these long-term worst-case projections. A 2004 CSIRO study, which was quoted by Worley Parsons ‘ report to the Great Lakes Council on the mid-north coast, states that actual sea level rise from 1920 to 2000 would have to accelerate by 400-900% this century to match IPCC forecasts. The extraordinary acceleration needed to achieve these rises was recently confirmed by Professor Michael Asten of the geophysics department at Monash University in an article applying an even longer view, averaging the actual rise from 1900 to 2010.

Further supporting the doubtful relevance of IPCC ‘s projections, the state government has, in a recently released draft planning circular, cautioned local councils about solely relying on IPCC figures, noting that “the further into the future we seek to predict an outcome, the more uncertainty that is associated with the prediction”. They suggest instead that councils also employ site-specific data to inform coastal management plans.

Some councils are choosing a different approach over blind adherence to IPCC ‘s predictions. In Fighting on the Beaches (Jan 11-12 2014 The Australian), Wyong Shire Council Mayor, Doug Eaton, was reported as saying  that councillors around the country are “terrorised” by the insurers, lawyers and local and state government bureaucrats to accept the IPCC predictions to reduce legal risk, and told they could bear personal liability if the council were sued.  But Eaton says that, as a lawyer himself, he has carefully analysed the issues and decided the council would still have the defence that it had acted in good faith because the Labor-era requirement to rely on the IPCC guidelines had been scrapped. “We threw out the sea-level rise crap,” Eaton says.

Wyong Shire Council has instead adopted a previous flood management benchmark plus a free-board of 50cm to account for unspecified allowance for sea level rise if the issue was raised in court.

These issues are on the agenda for CCPA ‘s upcoming meetings with CVC to continue discussions on the next version of Wooli’s CZMP.

P.S  Many thanks to Roger Welch for the pics in this article which he took in Solitary Islands Marine Park off Wooli.