Across the globe our communities are experiencing more severe weather events like storms, heatwaves, and extreme rainfall causing flash flooding, coastal erosion, and drying soils. Our Community infrastructure is becoming more impacted. The impacts are costing us more in terms of maintaining, repairing, rebuilding and insuring our assets. With more damage more frequently, our services are being disrupted which disadvantages our communities.
As custodians of community infrastructure with limited resources, the challenge to deliver infrastructure based services in this environment is a wicked one.
In the face of this challenge we are being asked by our Communities how can we demonstrate that we are factoring in Climate change? As asset managers how do we align the climate science with our asset knowledge, quantify climate risks and incorporate them in our long-term financial planning?
In this presentation Simon will talk about the Bass Coast Shire Council experience, how they bolted together climate science, asset risk assessment and scenario modelling processes on the journey to answering these questions.
The Bass Coast Shire Council journey started with a Climate Change Action Plan with a vision that their infrastructure is resilient to the impacts of climate change. Since 2022, Council has been using a regionally developed Asset Vulnerability Assessment (AVA) Toolkit. By using the AVA toolkit Council is better understand the risks, costs and service impacts to its infrastructure assets of climate change and adaptation.
The toolkit was developed collaboratively by 9 'SECCCA' member Councils in Melbourne’s southeast using climate science and asset data. To apply the Climate Measurement Standards Initiative principles, Council commissioned SAM modelling factoring extreme climatic impact risks which were sourced from the AVA toolkit.
This presentation will discuss the successes, challenges and next steps for Council and all local governments in Climate Resilient Asset Management Planning.