Sea-level rise has led to increased flooding. Flooding has always been around, but as you can see, over time, more and more flood events occur. This correlates with the rise in relative sea-level, which is due to the ocean getting higher, but also from the land getting lower. The net result is what is most important; the relative sea-level rise.

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I will use three examples of flooding from Europe. The first two are up in the North Sea: London and Holland, and finally the famous case of Venice, which is sinking fast. In 1953 there was a devastating storm surge in the North Sea. The storm surge was two and a half meters on the Netherlands' coast, two and a half meters on southern England, and dwindled away from there.

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Let me talk about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in southern Louisiana. It was scheduled that some Louisiana people were going to come up to work with us the day that Katrina hit, then we re-scheduled for us to go down to Louisiana the day Rita hit. So we decided that we'd wait until hurricane season was over. So we went down there, into a room full of angry people.

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Let's take a trip around the world and look at five examples. I'm going to do two examples from North America that I have been working with; the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, and coastal Louisiana--the mouth of the Mississippi River with marshes and the city of New Orleans. Let's look at the two major floods and how people have responded to those floods. They happened in 2003 for the Chesapeake and 2005 for Louisiana. In the Chesapeake there was a large hurricane called Isabel.

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Another legacy of what happened here was the whole idea of healthy waterways, and how that relates to healthy catchments, and healthy parks. In Victoria, their whole catchphrase is healthy parks, healthy people. So they are making the connection between the health of the ecosystem, and human health. One of CSIRO's flagships is water for a healthy country.

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One of the issues that has presented itself is that we've had a renaissance of the Brisbane River. When I moved here in 1992, I call it the dark ages, because the Brisbane River was the back yard of the buildings. It was being dredged for sand and gravel. Every day there was a coral dredge that would go back and forth, and now we have the buildings facing the front yard, we have the CityCat ferries. There was garbage, it was industrial, and now we have bikeways and the South Bank parklands.

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You can take a walk down the street to the Botanic Gardens; you can find a little park there; the Paluma Park. And that's to commemorate the location where a large gunship washed up into the Botanic Gardens in February, 1893. Interesting story, the Paluma was a gunship that was commissioned by the Queensland government. There were two gunships, the Gayundah and the Paluma, which were built because of the Russians.

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We really did have a learning moment. This is needed regarding the flooding and the impact of the flooding. We had two kinds of floods. We had the flash flooding that occurred up the Lockyer, and we had the riverine flooding that occurred in Ipswich and in Brisbane. The flash flooding, which is water coming down, was intense rainfall. We had two hundred millimeters in one hour, substantial amounts of rainfall leading to the rapid rise of water.

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A seminar entitled 'Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs' was presented on 8 July 2011. The seminar was sponsored by the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, and delivered at the historic Customs House in downtown Brisbane, situated along the shore of the Brisbane River. The following fifteen part blog series captures the talk, the question/answer section and the actual 'Dancing with Dugongs'. The Customs House in downtown Brisbane, Australia (Credit:

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Coastal Louisiana has experienced considerable land loss over the past century due to relative sea level rise. This land loss has led to increased vulnerability to storm surges, as dramatically illustrated when storm surges from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wrecked havoc on Louisiana in 2005. Immediately following the devastating 2005 hurricanes, the Integration and Application Network was asked to help contextualize the issues and provide graphical communication products.

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