From Recovery to Adaptation: The Impact of Floodwater on Suburban Sporting Fields and Communities

Community sports fields in Australia are commonly located in low-lying suburban flood plains, making them susceptible to regular inundation. These grounds are provided by the local governments at low cost or no cost leases and in return, municipality owned land is freely activated and maintained for the community free-use use and programming. Sports fields, with expansive open green surfaces are an integral part of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), where they absorb, and even retain, floodwaters and overland flow that may otherwise inundate people’s homes. This study surveys historic floods in the city of Brisbane by employing GIS mapping in space and time, projective cartography, and archival studies. Informed by this data, the focus of this chapter is on the 2022 flooding of the Kedron Brook Catchment (KBC) in Brisbane which inflicted the most substantial inundation, damage, and expensive repairs to sporting communities to date. These recent flood events have demonstrated that the existing infrastructure and design of sporting fields are inadequate to withstand or adapt to the ever-increasing frequency and severity of floods in the context of climate crisis. Government funding for recovery of suburban sports fields in 2022 in the Brisbane Local Government Area (LGA) cost close to $200 million, with this funding exclusively allocated toward recovery and not flood adaptive or resilient strategies (Queensland Government, Department of Tourism, Sport and Innovation, Community and Recreational Assets Recovery and Resilience Program—approved recipients. Government Report, 2022). This chapter discusses adaptive strategies for flood resilience that sporting clubs could adopt and governments should invest in. Flood adaptive design is critical as the threat of flooding in Brisbane increases alongside a rapidly growing population that will require further investment in community sporting facilities. There are numerous advantages of collocating sporting facilities along catchments and waterbodies and the inherent risk of this spatial adjacency could be better managed through the adaptive design strategies outlined in this chapter.