The Climate Change Adaptation for Natural Resource Management (NRM) in East Coast Australia Project aims to foster and support an effective “community of practice” for climate change adaptation within the East Coast Cluster NRM regions that will increase the capacity for adaptation to climate change through enhancements in knowledge and skills and through the establishment of long-term collaborations. The aims of this report are to summarise the needs of the regional bodies in relation to NRM planning for climate change adaptation, and provide a basis for developing the detailed work plan for the research consortium. The regional NRM bodies indicated they are interested in:

• project outputs that can be used directly in stakeholder engagement activities
• a summary of information or tools that are able to be used immediately
• information on climate projections at regional and sub-regional scale
• outputs that are ‘engagement ready’
• the impacts of climate change projections on ecosystems
• spatial mapping of carbon farming opportunities
• understand the vulnerability of industry groups as well as community to climate change impacts
• responses to disasters (particularly flooding and storm surge) and recovery responses
• processes to move towards a resilience approach to NRM planning from the current asset management approach
• examples of best practice in incorporating climate science into planning, using scenarios for stakeholder engagement in planning and processes for institutionalising learning.

The over-arching theme identified was the need for capacity building for the NRM bodies to best use the information available at any point in time. To this end a planners working group has been established to support the building of a network of informed and articulate NRM agents with knowledge of current climate science and capacity to use current tools to engage stakeholders in NRM planning for climate change adaptation.