Handbook CATLoG - Climate adaptation decision support tool for local governments


Background

Development of CATLoG (Climate Adaptation decision support Tool for Local Governments) is a National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) funded project specifically meant to assist decision makers in comparing and prioritising climate change adaptation investments with particular reference to extreme events. The Microsoft Excel-based Tool is specifically developed for Local Government use and is a result of contributions from a multi-disciplinary research team at Macquarie University and University of New South Wales and partner Councils Ku-ring-gai and Gosford.

The analysis of climate extremes is particularly important because of their high impact nature. Unfortunately, often end users do not entirely understand the range of uncertainties surrounding the research outputs they use for extreme event climate adaptation decision-making.

The theoretical framework followed for the quantitative part of the tool developed in this research is a risk management framework that includes three steps: risk identification, risk analysis and risk reduction. Risk identification includes identifying location-relevant climate extremes and exploring specific vulnerabilities of the location that are likely to be worsened if the extreme event occurs. Risk analysis and evaluation focuses on determining the frequency and potential negative consequences due to event occurrences.

The tool focuses on low frequency, high severity climate impacted events where historical data is scarce. Due to the lack of historical data, the tool relies on expert judgements on the frequency and severity of such events. It is important to point out that the results of the analysis are highly dependent on the quality of these judgements such that the reliability of the results depends on finding appropriate experts in the field who can provide appropriate estimates for frequency and impact of the considered events.

CATLoG will equip end users with an Excel-based software Tool to analyse and rank adaptation options with the help of a combination of quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods. This handbook comprises guidelines to assist stakeholders’ usage of the CATLoG Tool. A simple worked out example is given as Appendix A and potential solutions to compile errors of the Tool are given as Appendix B.

Please cite this report as:

Trück, S, Mathew, S, Henderson-Sellers, A, Taplin, R, Keighley, T & Chin, W 2013, Handbook CATLoG: Climate adaptation decision support tool for local governments. Prioritising climate change adaptation investments for local governments with particular focus on extreme events, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, 38 pp.

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Attributions and Constraints
Stefan Trueck,Supriya Mathew,Ann Henderson-Sellers,Ros Taplin,Tim Keighley,WoonChoo Chin
2013