Households in every council in Australia will face 'extreme affordability pressure' from escalating climate risks. See how your area compares.
It was 2:30am when the floodwaters seeped through the back door and into John and Dorothy McFadden's North Lismore home. Dorothy, who can't swim, saw the water first.
Dorothy and John McFadden pay roughly $3,500 a year for insurance that excludes flood cover. They lost nearly everything when their North Lismore home flooded in February this year. Vulnerable households – defined in the report as the one in ten households spending the largest share of income on insurance – currently pay an average of 7.4 weeks' pre-tax income on their premiums."That it is already as much as 10 per cent of households, or 1 million households, that was surprising. I didn't think it was that bad," says Sharanjit Paddam, the report's lead author.
"So, if [other reports] are talking about 500,000 [uninsurable homes] by 2030, then we think that we're already there."While vulnerable households are concentrated in northern Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern New South Wales, the report emphasises that vulnerable households exist in every council area in Australia.In the City of Melbourne, for example, one in five households is under extreme affordability pressure, while in the City of Adelaide, it's one in 11.
Climate change will dramatically widen the gap between those who can and can't afford to pay, the report finds. On top of that, low-cost housing, including rental properties, tends to be in higher-risk areas, like flood or bushfire zones, and built to poorer standards. They are also more likely to be single parents or living alone, women, renting, and to have low insurance literacy and low savings.
Ms O'Reilly lives in Speewah, set in the tablelands in far north Queensland's Mareeba Shire, one of the 10 LGAs facing the biggest hits to insurance affordability as climate risks escalate, according to the research. The region is already ranked 17th among 533 council areas for Australia's least affordable home insurance.
But as global warming causes extreme weather events to become more frequent and more severe, this picture quickly worsens.
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