If your council will be engaging in a climate change adaptation process, consider adopting the following principles to guide your work:

• Balance of immediate and long-term needs: Acknowledge that climate change impacts will continue to take shape over the long-term based on our actions today, but they are already emerging. Councils must, therefore, ensure their approach is one that finds a balance between immediate and long-term needs.
• Interaction must be supplemented with action: Acknowledge that the complexity and transboundary nature of climate change impacts means that many stakeholders will need to act to develop a truly holistic response to those impacts, yet the coordination of such a large number of actors is daunting. Councils must, therefore, commit to driving this Initiative by identifying and following-through on the actions they can undertake themselves or directly influence without getting sidetracked by the role or held back by the inaction of other stakeholders.
• Commitment to act in the face of uncertainty: Acknowledge the tendency to not act until perfect information is available – and the reality that perfect information on the impacts of climate change will never truly be available as climate change scenarios are being revised and improved regularly. Councils must, therefore, commit to an approach that enables staff to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Skills that council staff need to develop to meet these principles are:

• Clarity – Of what you want to accomplish and how you plan to get there;
• Creativity – In how you deal with the complexity of climate change impacts; and
• Courage – In terms of your ability to take action in the face of uncertainty.

Additional skills that have proven extremely useful for councils undertaking this process include:

• Collaboration – In terms of how open you are to seek out and utilise others’ knowledge;
• Learning – In terms of examining your underlying assumptions and outcomes and identifying opportunities to improve your approach; and
• Leadership – In terms of your ability to provide strategic guidance when decisions are difficult and strong governance throughout the process.

Source: CCP Adaptation Initiative (2008)

Some valuable links are available, as follows:

Australian Government Department of Climate Change

• CCIRM guide [PDF, 680 KB]
• Climate Change Projections for Australia
• Historical Climate Trends
• Likely Climate Change Impacts
• Climate Change Adaptation Actions for Local Government  [PDF, 1 MB]

CSIRO / Bureau of Meteorology Climate Change Projections

• Climate Change in Australia website
• Climate Change in Australia Technical Report
• CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship

ICLEI USA

• Preparing for Climate Change: A Guidebook for Local, Regional, and State Governments. By Center for Science in the Earth System, University of Washington; King County, Washington; and ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability (2007)