Last modified on Fri 9 Apr 2021 16.47 EDT
Urban planners and water scientists have urged the New South Wales government to offer to buy back thousands of homes in flood-prone areas of western Sydney, as overdevelopment sets a trajectory for the number of uninsurable houses in the city to surge.
Infrastructure NSW has acknowledged residential property buybacks would be “effective” to mitigate flood risk in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley and across western Sydney, but the government agency has said such a scheme would incur “very significant social and economic costs”.
The call for buybacks, from the urban thinktank the Committee for Sydney, followed floods in March that inundated parts of western Sydney after Warragamba Dam spilled over, and wreaked havoc across NSW and south-east Queensland.
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