Professor Beverley Clarke and the CASPR team have recently completed a compendium of coastal adaptation planning drawn from every coastal council in South Australia. This research presents a snapshot and baseline of the state’s coastal councils’ approach to adaptation funded by the Department for Environment and Water’s Coastal Research and Development Grant scheme.
Understanding South Australian coastal councils’ approach to adaptation planning from a strategic management perspective has potential to lead to better coordination, resourcing, and information sharing. The State’s 34 coastal councils will be exposed to changing climatic conditions and some are already implementing actions to address coastal erosion and flooding.
This study investigates the embeddedness of coastal hazard risk into councils’ strategic planning frameworks, and stages of adaptation planning, based on desktop research limited to council strategic planning documentation and coastal adaption studies publicly available at the time of writing (2020/2021). The outcome is a state synthesis presenting a high-level observation of current capacity of coastal councils to adapt to changing climatic conditions.
The executive summary can be downloaded here.
