A three-tier risk assessment process for climate change adaptation at a local scale

Abstract

Formal structures for evaluating climate change risk are important components of adaptation decision-making. In this paper, we present an accessible, cost-effective and user-tested climate change risk assessment framework which allows organisations to systematically apply a risk management process aligned with international standards to identify and manage their climate change risks. It is delivered through 'CoastAdapt', a resource supporting climate change adaptation in Australia. This three-tier framework offers four benefits to the adaptation process. First, it allows organisations to identify climate change risks and integrate them with their mainstream risk management process. Second, it makes optimal use of an organisation's limited adaptation resources by taking a tiered approach, so allowing an organisation to start from a low knowledge base using minimal resources and, only if required, then move to more complex and resource-intensive risk assessment processes. Third, it introduces a time-dependent vulnerability rating which recognises the particular characteristics of climate change risks-that they are long term and associated with a considerable degree of uncertainty. Finally, it takes into account business inter-dependencies that can exacerbate impacts but be overlooked in a sector-based impacts evaluation. In this paper, we highlight the appropriate context in which to use each risk assessment tier, explore key technical differences among the three tiers, describe performance testing and present one case study of application. We discuss the benefits of this tiered risk assessment approach in the context of broader adaptation planning.

Decision support platforms for climate change adaptation: an overview and introduction

“…& CoastAdapt is designed to support coastal adaptation in Australia (Palutikof et al 2019a;Tonmoy et al 2019). & The Adaptation Wizard is an early and comprehensive decision support resource for the UK (Street et al 2019), and many subsequent adaptation platforms have taken its good practice as a starting point, with two examples described by Street et al (2019).…”

“…to be incorporated from elsewhere basis for many of the risk assessment and management processes built into subsequent adaptation platforms (e.g. Prutsch et al 2014;Tonmoy et al 2019).…”

“…The steps are broadly similar across a number of adaptation platforms: frame the problem, identify the risks, identify and evaluate options, prepare a plan, take action, and, finally, monitor and evaluate the results. The process allows for iteration depending on outcomes at each step, for example in CoastAdapt (Tonmoy et al 2019) the outcome from the final step of monitoring and evaluation can lead to a return to the step of evaluating the options.…”

Tracking the progress of climate change adaptation: An Australian case study

“…We identified four broad categories of adaptation stage, drawn from the risk management frameworks developed for adaptation by a number of centres (e.g., Willlows and Connell 2003;Tonmoy et al 2019). These are: pre-planning, planning, implementation (action) and monitoring and evaluation (M&E).…”

“…In addition, there needs to be motivation to undertake the full adaptation process, from identifying potential impacts and risks, through to evaluating adaptation options, planning for action, undertaking action and, finally, evaluating the outcomes. This is often characterised as a risk management process (Tonmoy et al 2019).…”