Climate has a significant influence on the sustainability of service delivery by North East Water (NEW), which has been evidenced over the past decade. NEW developed an "Adapting to a Changing Climate" strategic initiative to assist the Corporation to adapt to an uncertain and increasingly variable climate. The objective was to ensure that NEW has strategies and processes in place that to enable service quality and delivery reliability is maintained to meet the needs of our Customers and Communities.

To meet the objective, our approach has focussed on two key processes:

1.            Vulnerability & Resilience assessments -  to understand the potential impacts on our assets, service delivery and people. 

2.            Embedding processes -  to embed adaptation thinking within existing key business strategies, systems and processes.

During the vulnerability assessments, there were some surprising results. Whilst it was expected that key ‘climate hazards' such as drought, bushfire, storms and floods would be obvious, heatwave events also presented a key risk to our services, which was verified during the Summer of 2014.

NEW also found that embedding adaptation thinking  within key Corporation business functions and systems, such as Corporate Strategic Planning, Asset Life Cycle Management, Emergency Management as a preferred approach rather than the establishment of an isolated (possibly disconnected) strategy. 

Although this strategic approach is relatively simple, it has assisted NEW to better understand the potential impacts of a changing climate, and is leading to improved business processes that enable us to maintain and improve the resilience of our service delivery.