Selecting climate futures for NRM planning: making the best use of new and prior information (945)
The concept of 'climate futures' was developed (by the CSIRO/BoM Projections team) to make planning based on hundreds of available climate model projections more tractable. The climate futures framework groups models into categories based on amount of change, then calculates which futures are suggested by the greatest proportion of models to aid with selection of a few representative futures for planning. However, an additional challenge in NRM planning is that information from multiple domains (e.g. agriculture, biodiversity, water) must be integrated. It would be inappropriate to integrate derived impacts and adaptation information from different domains that was derived based on different climate futures. As much of this domain-specific information already exists, the process of selecting climate futures for planning must take into account the futures for which information is already available, not just likelihood or representativeness. We developed a process for selecting climate futures that integrates knowledge of their likelihood at different time periods with the availability of additional impacts and adaptation products. The process was developed for the regional NRM groups in the lower Murray River Basin, but is applicable to any organisation that needs to integrate information from multiple domains and make the best use of existing information alongside the new climate futures framework. We describe our process, and suggest it provides a concrete method for envisioning and planning for multiple futures - one of the core challenges of climate adaptation.