- Urban Water Supplies; Climate Change – Australia
- Building Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools, and Practice
- The Climate Adaptation Frontier
- Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS for Flood Hazard Management
- Climate Change Adaptation and the Rental Sector
Urban Water Supplies & Climate Change – Australia
NCCARF’s policy guidance briefs address key challenges to effectively adapting Australia to a variable and changing climate, providing high-level policy advice designed for use by policy makers at Commonwealth and State level. This policy guidance brief deals with the challenge of managing the urban water supply under climate change. The example location is south-west Western Australia (SWWA), which is experiencing a long-term drying trend linked to climate change that will likely persist.
Planning, Ensuring Australia’s Urban Water Supplies under Climate Change, Policy Guidance Brief 2, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF), Gold Coast, Australia, 2013 [1.35 MB, PDF]
Building Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools, and Practice
This handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas. The objective is to demonstrate a scalable methodology and practical tools for risk assessment that can be used for city-level investment decisions. It offers open-source risk assessment tools that can be used by city-level institutions, other communities, private investors, and planners of infrastructure services. The handbook contains case studies and tables that provide further details and examples of good practice to enhance disaster resilience.>
Building Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools, and Practice, Jha, Abhas K et al., Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the World Bank, 2013 [14.63 MB, PDF]
The Climate Adaptation Frontier
The paper introduces the concept of an ‘adaptation frontier’, which is defined as a socio-ecological system’s transitional adaptive operating space between safe and unsafe domains. It explores the possible outcomes for systems that find themselves within frontier territory and how they might find their way back to more sustainable regions. The paper concludes with some discussion of the implications of the adaptation frontier for how adaptation researchers and practitioners frame the concept of adaptation and the extent to which more optimistic or pessimistic socio-ecological futures will prevail.
The Climate Adaptation Frontier, Benjamin L. Preston, Kirstin Dow, and Frans Berkhout,Sustainability, vol. 5, no. 3, 2013 [1.08 MB, PDF]
Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS for Flood Hazard Management
Floods are one of the most common hazards in the world, affecting people’s lives and livelihoods. Flood hazard mapping and flood shelters suitability analysis are vital elements in appropriate land use planning for flood-prone areas. This paper describes application of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in identifying flood hazard zones and flood shelters. It describes a simple and efficient methodology to accurately delineate flood inundated areas, flood-hazard areas, and suitable areas for flood shelter to minimize flood impacts.
Application of Remote Sensing and GIS for Flood Hazard Management: A Case Study from Sindh Province, Pakistan, Kabir Uddin, Deo Raj Gurung, Amarnath Giriraj, Basanta Shrestha, American Journal of Geographic Information System, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-5, 2013 [655 KB, PDF]
Climate Change Adaptation and the Rental Sector
The research employs an asset-based approach to understanding the capacities, assets and skills which tenants, landlords and housing managers bring to climate change adaptation. It focuses on the adaptive capacity of low-income renters in the public and private sectors, addressing the equity dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation. The research finds that the tenants are motivated by concern about the impact of human activity on the environment, and exercise this concern through everyday sustainable household practices, as well as through engagement with community or political organisations.
Climate Change Adaptation and the Rental Sector, Lesley Instone, Kathleen Mee, Jane Palmer, Miriam Williams, and Nicola Vaughan, The University of Newcastle Australia and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF), Gold Coast, Australia, 2013 [1.23 MB, PDF]
International Workshop: Living in Low-income Urban Settlements
This international workshop (living in low-income urban settlements in an era of climate change: processes, practices, policies and politics) will be held on 9-10 September 2013 in University of Manchester, UK. The workshop aims: to deepen the understanding of the broader processes that shape and mediate the responses to climate change of poor urban households and communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and to contribute to the evolution of more effective pro-poor climate change policies by local governments, national governments and international organisations. For more details, please visit the website given below.
Living in Low-income Urban Settlements in an Era of Climate Change: Processes, Practices, Policies and Politics, International Workshop, University of Manchester, UK, 9-10 September 2013 [132 KB, PDF]
For further information, please contact the editor, Saleem Janjua: daptnet@rmit.edu.au
Professor Darryn McEvoy, Program Leader, RMIT University Climate Change Adaptation Programme
Professor Peter Hayes, Co-founder and Executive Director of Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability
Dr. Saleem Janjua, Editor AdaptNet
AdaptNet is a free fortnightly report produced by RMIT University Global Cities Research Institute’s Climate Change Adaptation Programme, Melbourne, Australia. It is published in partnership with the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability.