Climate change means more frequent and severe weather — whether that’s floods, storms, heat or droughts.

Building a better Brisbane means thinking holistically about how we design our homes and neighbourhoods to let air and water flow.

Brisbane needs to be a flowing city.

We want to work with communities to be more prepared for heat, fire and flood. Cooling, environmental sustainability and water sensitive design need to be central to planning how we build homes — like the work of Water Sensitive Cities.

Cover of "Water Sensitive Outcomes for Infill Development: final report", B. Sochacka et al, 2020"

We need to learn from other subtropical cities who face these challenges and not just copy ideas from Europe and North America that don’t share our climate.

A picture of a subtropical city getting it right.

By protecting mansions on hilltops from development, we’re forcing apartments into flood-prone industrial land — risking people’s safety and our city’s climate adaptation plan to keep some millionaires’ streets frozen in time.

The purple here are “character” neighbourhoods.

A picture of inner Brisbane's character neighbourhood zoning overlaid on the flood risk map.

We need to start building for our worst case climate future, right now.