The delivery of Australia’s new climate change projections by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology is designed to support medium-term planning within Australia’s natural resource management (NRM) regions. This planning will determine how Australia’s land, biodiversity and coastal assets are managed under future climate change. Research suggests that the provision of decision-relevant climate change projection information should be geographically and temporally specific to the decision making community who will access the information and data (Street 2011). These data must also be internally consistent and adequately sample the relevant range of the future climate projections (CSIRO and Australian Bureau of Meteorology 2007, Chapter 6).

CSIRO’s Climate Futures framework (Whetton et al. 2012) provides a mechanism for exploring the range of projected future climates, identifying the relevant ‘climate futures’ and obtaining representative datasets. An online web-tool called Pacific Climate Futures was developed under the Pacific Climate Change Science Program for use in developing island nations of the Pacific. An Australian version of the tool is now in development.

In this presentation we will demonstrate the use of the web tool in developing internally consistent climate projections datasets for use in impact assessments and adaptation planning.

References

CSIRO and Australian Bureau of Meteorology (2007) Climate change in Australia : technical report. (CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research: Aspendale, Australia).

Street R (2011) 'What types of information are needed for adaptation decision making?' in Decision Making in a Changing Climate. (UNEP World Resources Institute in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, and World Bank, ed.) (WRI: Washington, DC).