December 2, 2025
Co-Designed Applications for Local Decision-Making
Australia’s climate future is increasingly defined by compound events, where multiple hazards such as heatwaves, bushfires, floods, and storms occur simultaneously or sequentially, amplifying their impacts. These complex risks challenge traditional planning frameworks and demand new approaches to climate information that are locally relevant, decision-focused, and inclusive of diverse knowledge systems. This report presents the outcomes of the project Understanding Climate Risk: Co-designed Applications for Local Decision Making, led by the University of Tasmania, supported by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Climate Systems Hub and funded by the National Emergency Management Agency Disaster Risk Reduction Package. This initiative advances the objectives of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework by enhancing the capacity of decision-makers to access critical information and tools for managing current and future climate-related risks.
The aim of the NEMA funding is to enhance the accessibility and relevance of national climate risk information to better support informed decision-making. This project strengthens accountable decision-making by building the capacity of decision-makers to understand the influence of climate on natural disasters, both now and into the future. It encourages consideration of a broad range of relevant factors, helps identify priority risks, and highlights opportunities for mitigation and adaptation.
The objective of the project is to improve the accessibility and applicability of future climate hazard information to better inform risk analysis and decision-making. The project aims to address the limitations of applying conventional climate model outputs to understand the risk of individual climate-related hazards. For example, a flood is often not just a flood – it is a consequence of other drivers that can exacerbate the risk due to other impacts occurring over a region (eg strong winds leading to treefall on powerlines bring power disruptions, extreme rain and poor vegetation cover increasing erosion with potential for landslides). Conventional outputs often fail to capture the cascading nature of compound risks and are difficult for local decision-makers to interpret and apply. Alternative methods of applying climate information for decision making, will be explored to develop worked through examples of applications and resources to assist the process. In response, the project explores the use of narrative scenario approaches, qualitative, co-designed methods that integrate scientific data with lived experience, stakeholder values, and systems thinking. These approaches offer a flexible and context-sensitive way to translate climate science into actionable insights for adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
Read the report and appendices here >