The impacts of climate change will affect the social, economic, environmental and cultural values of the Murray–Darling Basin. Some elements will be more vulnerable than others. There will be many options for avoiding, ameliorating or adapting to these impacts. To enhance the ability of the Australian Government and stakeholders to assess likely future impacts of climate adaptation, we are developing a toolkit of new and existing information, knowledge and models. This will enable transparent, repeatable assessments of impacts and adaptation to future climates.
The toolkit enables end-users to choose future climate scenarios, identify possible adaptation options and then model flows associated with those scenarios. These can then be used to understand resultant responses of identified values, be they social, cultural, environmental or economic, and enhance our ability to account for such impacts on water supplies and Basin assets in water planning.
Here, we provide a demonstration of the key functionality of the toolkit. The toolkit’s modelling backbone consists of a series of elements: the Scenario Controller, the Response Model, the Aggregator and the Comparer. The Response Model component provides flexible models of the responses to flow sequences. For the demonstration, an existing model of environmental responses is used. This will be extended to include modules for social, cultural and economic values. These components are complemented by a causal network which captures the rationale for links between hydrology, climate and the response of values and assets.
This demonstration illustrates a minimal but functioning version of the climate adaptation toolkit and provides the foundation for additional development. It thus provides the basis to assess the impact of climate adaptation measures on social, cultural, environmental and economic values and assets in the Murray–Darling Basin, which will be developed as a part of the Murray–Darling Water and Environment Research Program.