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CoastAdapt: A new tool for a changing climate helps coastal communities prepare

Coastal decision makers can now test a new tool that provides them with pretty much everything they need to adapt their community or business to coastal climate impacts.

Click here to access CoastAdapt.

CoastAdapt is an online decision support and information delivery system designed specifically to meet the needs of coastal decision makers in government and business as well as community groups and NGOs.

The beta version was launched in Melbourne on 23 August by the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) at a meeting with local, state and national leaders in coastal management. It is now open for review and feedback.

CoastAdapt brings together a diverse range of information, maps, guidance, and international and Australian examples of coastal adaptation in three main sections.

  1. Current reliable information on all aspects of coastal management under climate change including access to nationally consistent data sets.
  2. A decision support system, known as C-CADS, takes users through steps to determine what response is necessary, timing of actions, costs and how to monitor and evaluate the results.
    1. An online forum for the community of adaptors, CoastExchange, is where users can share problems, news and ideas. A highlight of this forum is ‘Ask an expert’ where coastal decision-makers can pose questions to a panel of experts.

In developing CoastAdapt, NCCARF incorporated input from around 700 coastal decision makers through an extensive consultation process.  Nine local governments and one industry group have also been intensively involved as tool development partners to provide detailed feedback on both the structure and content of the tool.

The beta version of CoastAdapt is now open for review and feedback.  Follow the links in the section below to visit the site. review and consultation will be open until November 2016. The final version of CoastAdapt will be launched in 2017.

Provide feedback on CoastAdapt

Decision makers are being given early access to the beta tool to provide feedback by November 2016.

You can provide feedback in three ways:

  1. through providing comments via the ‘feedback’ tab on the side of the page as you use the tool
  2. once you have had experience of the tool you can access our survey here (and you can go into the draw to win an ipad)
  3. by emailing your comments to info-nccarf@griffith.edu.au.