Consistency in coastal climate adaption planning in Australia and the importance of understanding local political barriers to implementation

Abstract

The discipline of coastal climate adaptation in Australia has been increasingly practiced as communities become more aware of the likely future impacts of sea level rise. As a result, a number of coastal adaptation plans, strategies and guidelines and have been developed for coastal urban communities around the Australian coastline over the last decade. Given that a number of plans have been developed for different communities facing the same issues, it is timely to compare and contrast these plans. To this end a set of these coastal adaptation plans developed for Australian communities were compared in order to consider the variability in the recommended adaptation responses and general consistency of the plans. The adaptation responses proposed in the plans were also assessed for their ability to be implemented. Despite the similarity in the cities and towns considered in the analysis and the commonality of risk arising from sea level rise, no consistent set of adaptation recommendations arose that was common across the communities. This lack of consistency suggests a lack of understanding of the effectiveness and implement-ability of many of the proposed adaptation responses. This lack of consistency is explored here and it appears that many, if not most of the plans considered contained adaptation recommendations which will be difficult to implement.