Will your organisation be ready for the impacts of natural hazards and climate change as they become more significant in the near future? What can you do today to be ready to face a tomorrow that is fundamentally changed by natural hazards and climate?
New Transformative Scenarios in a Climate-challenged World resources provide a set of plausible futures to help leaders in the emergency management sector across Australia and New Zealand understand what 2035 could look like under the compounding pressures of natural hazards and climate change, so they can stress-test their current services and decide how best to adapt.
The duration, scale and intensity of the 2019-20 bushfires and the subsequent disruptions of COVID-19 remind us that the management of natural hazards does not always go as expected, and that we cannot rely on the past as a good indicator of the future. The importance of using plausible futures to adapt and mitigate against likely climatic shifts over the next decade was emphasised by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report on the current knowledge of the physical science of climate change. Importantly, the climate is not the only thing that is changing – where and how we live will change, the political environment will be different, and the social and economic drivers of society will have changed.
The use of transformative scenarios – sometimes called plausible or alternative futures – is a way for organisations to strategise and adapt now, to prepare for a future where we will see different social and political drivers, and where climate change will result in more frequent, severe and compounding natural hazards.
The research team worked with leaders in emergency management to develop four distinct and plausible scenarios likely to unfold between now and 2035 in Australia and New Zealand, based on current climate trends. The four scenarios are presented as four different variations on social cohesion (low or high) and governance (reactionary or strategic; long-term or short-term).
Using these scenarios, organisations can consider the impacts of natural hazards and climate change and assess whether current organisational practices and plans will be sufficient in the context of each plausible future. Using a 'board game' analogy, organisations can use the pieces (resources) to explore how well their current and forward-looking organisational planning will prepare them for a climate change-affected future.
This gives organisational leaders an opportunity to make informed decisions about how to adapt their services and mitigate against the likely impacts of climate change to come.
Research Director of Natural Hazards Research Australia, Dr John Bates, explains that these resources include the flexibility to visualise different possible severities and impacts of natural hazards so that organisations can develop informed planning solutions.
“One of the challenges in planning for climate change has been understanding how the continental-scale climate predictions will play out at a local level – and combining that with the social, political, economic and environmental changes that will develop alongside, or because of, the changes in the climate,” Dr Bates said.
“The plausible futures we have developed combine all those elements to help you visualise what our future world might look like. You can use them to see how well current approaches to disaster risk reduction, disaster resilience, emergency response and disaster recovery will work in these futures – and explore how actions you can take now could help us all be better prepared for 2035.”
The resources are all available here, including guidance on how to use them.
Lead researchers of this project were Geoff Brown and Stephen Atkinson from Reos Partners, and Prof Lauren Rickards and Dr Adriana Keating from RMIT University.