Climate Council flags ten areas where it will become impossible to insure your home by 2030

There are ten areas where it will be extremely difficult to insure your home by 2030 and one city where up to 90 per cent of homes will be at risk.

There are ten areas across Australia where it will become extremely difficult to insure your home by 2030 and one city where up to 90 per cent of homes will be at risk of catastrophic flooding, according to a bombshell new report form the Climate Council.

The environment group says the ten federal electorates it has singled out across the nation are most at risk of natural disasters including floods and bushfires.

Five of them, Maranoa, Moncrieff, Wright, Brisbane and Griffith, are in southeast Queensland.

Meanwhile, an area in northern Victoria that is part of the Murray-Darling Basin was deemed the most vulnerable part of the country for flooding.

The Climate Council claims 26.5 per cent of homes — some 25,000 homes — in the electorate of Nicholls, which covers the major regional centres of Shepparton and Echuca, would be uninsurable by 2030.

City where 90 per cent of homes are at risk

The worst hit area in Nicholls, and the nation as a whole, would be Shepparton on the Goulburn River.

The Council claims up to 90 per cent of homes in the city would become impossible to insure in just eight years despite there not being a major inundation in Shepparton since 2010.

“In addition to riverine flooding, many properties in localities around Shepparton are also at risk of surface water flooding due to the flat topography, effectively meaning these properties have been built on flood plains,” the Council said in the report.

The second most at-risk area in Australia was Richmond in NSW — which encompasses Tweed, Byron and Ballina. The Council said 20.9 per cent of homes in Richmond, some 22,274 properties, were at high risk of either flooding or bushfires.

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The Climate Council has broken down which parts of the nation are most at risk from flooding and bushfires.

“Riverine flooding, from the Richmond River and its tributaries, presents the greatest risk in this electorate, particularly to homes and businesses along the coast and near rivers,” the report stated. “In coastal towns such as Ballina, high tides compound the risk of riverine flooding.”

In early March 2022, a 1.8 metre king tide combined with record-breaking floods and impacted roughly 6000 homes in the Ballina area.

“What’s more, the latest available census data show median weekly family and household incomes in Richmond are well below the national average,” the Council said.

“Richmond workers are also overrepresented in part time work and under-represented in full time work compared to national averages, demonstrating that climate impacts are being felt by those who can least afford them.”

The report also singled out Indi (Vic), which encompasses the towns of Wodonga, Wangaratta, Glenrowan, Benalla, Bright and the Victorian snowfields and Lake Eildon, as one of the most at-risk areas in the nation due to riverine flooding.

The NSW region of Page, which includes the towns of Lismore, Casino, Dunoon, Yamba, Evans Head, Grafton, Iluka, Kyogle and Wooli, contains 11,691 properties at high risk of bushfires or riverine flooding according to the report.

This year’s flooding has been the worst in years. Picture: Dan Peled/Getty Images

The Hindmarsh region in SA, an inner metropolitan electorate encompassing approximately 100,000 properties in Adelaide’swestern suburbs, is also one of the top ten high-risk areas pointed to in the report.

“Its estuarine features have led to numerous cases of historical flooding, which remains the electorate’s biggest threat,” the Council said.

“The region’s relatively flat topography also results in surface water flooding in the event of heavy or persistent rainfall. The suburbs of Port Adelaide, West Lakes, Grange and Ethelton being most at risk.”

One-in-100 year mapping is ‘outdated’

The severity of the recent floods in NSW and Queensland may have exposed potential flaws in modelling for climate change impacts – with homeowners warned that 1-in-100 year mapping is now “outdated”.

Climate Valuation chief executive officer Dr Karl Mallon, whose company specialises in assessing climate change risk for people’s properties, says it will re-evaluate its ratings after the latest extreme weather hit harder than expected.

Dr Mallon said Climate Valuation gets data from global flood modelling specialists from the United Kingdom and Sweden – which also supply data to insurance agencies in Australia – that predict where water will flow by looking at rainfall and land topology.

This data indicated the recent flooding event in Lismore would be considered extremely rare – not just a 1-in-100 year event, more like a 1-in-1000 year event.

Lismore was one of the worst hit cities in this year’s flooding. Picture: Dan Peled/Getty Images

“That leaves us with two possibilities,” Dr Mallon told news.com.au.

“One, is that it genuinely was a rare event and those houses were somewhat unlucky to be in the wrong place and the wrong time.

“Or climate change is effecting the probability of these events and this suggests that all risk management communities need to reassess their view on the likelihood and severity of these extreme flooding events.”

– with Charis Chang