To facilitate adaptation, the NSW Government has been undertaking Integrated Regional Vulnerability Assessments (IRVA) in NSW. An IRVA is a process designed to develop a shared understanding among stakeholders of the likely vulnerability to climate change and stimulate action to plan adaptation. In NSW they are carried out so as to incorporate:

• a systems thinking approach that acknowledges communities exist within human-natural (or social-ecological) systems
• participatory engagement in which stakeholders co-create an understanding of vulnerability through their understanding of the region
• a focus on developing an understanding of the constraints to adaptation, and on identifying opportunities for building adaptive capacity to better deal with climate shocks regardless of their nature or timing, and
• qualitative analysis supported wherever possible with quantitative data, which acknowledges that societal interactions are complex and contradictory in nature, and not amenable to expert-led, reductionist approaches to problem analysis.

The process establishes the impacts of future climate on sectors with preliminary discussion of adaptive capacity constraints relevant to the sector and then brings sectors together to identify key regional vulnerabilities, the focus for adaptive capacity development in the region. To date four have been undertaken across NSW, covering the South-East, Riverina-Murray, Sydney and North Coast.

This bottom-up approach presents an opportunity to aggregate the emerging outputs and identify common vulnerabilities across the regions for consideration at the state level. The NSW Government is undertaking a pilot that will establish the feasibility of aggregating these outputs for strategic consideration at the state-wide level.