City of South Perth are custodians of circa $165M buildings and facilities providing major community services to 46,701 residents. This equates to approximately $3,533 per resident, the equivalent of a drinking fountain, park bench or play equipment.
The future ability to continue delivering these services is dependent on the performance of its physical buildings and the City’s response to climate change.
It is essential as Asset Managers to ensure climate adaptation and mitigation strategies are incorporated into Asset Management Planning.
To address the impacts of climate change, and to develop a scenario-based asset plan, the City undertook a performance audit which encompassed IPWEA’s principles of condition, capacity and functionality. Additionally, climate risk was incorporated into modelling building performance, for the City to determine the impact and its response to Climate Change as highlighted in IPWEA’s Practice Notes 12.1 and 12.2.
This provided the City with a service level view of the future as opposed to a straight-line accounting approach in perpetuity. Simply put the City can now model:
1) The future state of the City where climate and funding are considered together;
2) An infrastructure resilient future to determine the future funding required if climate and service criticality were key inputs;
3) How to balance the budgets - trading off high and low priorities;
4) Climate adaptive strategies, using the model to provide wisdom rationale - to determine asset repurposing or retreat. This is key to our future deliberative engagement.
Overall, this case study provides the basis of the future of SAM which is communicating stories of the future so stakeholders can make prudent decisions. It shifts the thinking for us from an assumed perpetual state in asset management to a more scenario-based state where assets may be rationalised, repurposed, relocated or retreated in a holistic Level of Service plan.