BEACH SMART OR BEACH STUPID?

Last Updated on Monday, 11 January 2010 12:42 Tuesday, 22 September 2009 16:38

Byron Shire has had an excellent policy in place to protect the coastline from climate change, which the NSW government should support instead of bagging it, said Total Environment Centre today

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The state government has told Byron Shire Council to change policies that stop homeowners building seawalls to protect their properties, a position at odds with sensible planning for climate change.
“The government should be investing in sensible adaptation on the part of the human population, which is the key to an effective climate change plan, instead of dumping a good policy at the first opportunity,” said TEC director Jeff Angel.
“Sandbagging individual properties and building seawalls does not constitute effective or long term planning,” Mr Angel added. “It is short sighted, temporary practice which interferes with the natural inter-tidal activity of the coastline, and ruins the rhythm of erosion and deposition which create beaches in the first place.”
Yet the deputy director-general of the NSW government's Department of Environment and Climate Change, Simon Smith, has written to Byron council urging it to “set out potential arrangements that would permit appropriate landowner-funded coastal protection works.”
“For twenty years Byron Shire has had the best “planned retreat” adaptation policy you could wish for, so why does the state government want to kill it off?” Mr Angel asked. “In the long term relocation is the only practical answer to changing sea levels which residents can and should bank on.”