December 2, 2025
Co-Designed applications for local decision-making
Australia’s climate future is increasingly defined by compound events. 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. Project Understanding Climate Risk: Co-designed Applications for Local Decision Making, led by the University of Tasmania, advances the objectives of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework. The project strengthens decision-making by building the capacity of decision-makers to understand the influence of climate on natural disasters, both now and into the future. The consideration of a broad range of relevant factors helps identify priority risks and highlights opportunities for mitigation and adaptation.
Project objectives
Improving the accessibility and applicability of future climate hazard information to better inform risk analysis and decision-making is key. Aiming 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 risk due to other impacts such as strong winds, power disruptions, extreme rain, and potential landslides.
Conventional outputs often fail to capture the cascading nature of risks and are difficult for decision-makers to interpret and apply. Alternative methods of applying climate information will be explored to develop 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 >