Identify current and future climate hazards and how they can cause or increase harm from your activities

Climate hazards can be:

  • acute (e.g. the sudden onset of extreme weather)
  • chronic (e.g. long-term changes that occur over years or decades).

Acute climate hazards

  • Heatwaves and extreme heat
  • Bushfires
  • Extreme rainfall
  • Storm events
  • Floods.

Chronic climate hazards

  • Temperature rise
  • Annual rainfall changes
  • Drought (can also be acute)
  • Sea-level rise.

This section will help you identify:

  • existing and future climate hazards
  • how climate hazards can cause or increase harm from your activities.

Identify current climate hazards and potential harm from your activities

The effects of climate change differ across Victoria. Some areas are at a higher risk from flood, bushfire or sea-level rise.

Your site location and geographical area may be vulnerable to climate hazards now. This may be, because it:

  • is in or near an area prone to bushfires or floods
  • is in a coastal or low-lying area
  • has experienced previous extreme weather events.

To help you identify which climate hazards may affect your area, see below.

Victorian sources:

National sources:

How may current climate hazards cause or increase harm from new developments and existing activities? To understand how, map out:

  • changes to sources of pollution and waste
  • exposure pathways
  • exposure receptors.

A conceptual site model can help.

For each relevant climate hazard, ask how it impacts different activities:

  • how might [climate hazard] impact various infrastructure/ assets?
  • how might [climate hazard] impact the storage of materials (raw, bulk, hazardous, liquids)?
  • how might [climate hazard] lead to process upsets? (e.g., break downs or failure of environmental controls)
  • how might [climate hazard] impact your site stormwater system and storage or discharge of liquid process wastes?
  • how might [climate hazard] impact your emissions and discharges?
  • how might [climate hazard] generate more waste streams?

Identified current climate hazards already causing harm from your activities

Climate change may have already caused or increased harm from your activities.

To determine this, review:

  • incident records or insurance claims
  • environmental complaint records
  • maintenance logs
  • emergency response records
  • any long-term monitoring related to your site.

You can also ask long-standing employees if and how climate hazards have affected your business over the years.

What if these types of events were to become more frequent, extreme or last longer? What extra controls might be needed?

Identify future climate hazards and potential harm from your activities

A key step in assessing physical climate risks is to consult climate change projections.

The information you use should allow you to undertake a qualitative risk assessment. This can help inform you about how to eliminate or reduce the risk to an acceptable level.

To understand how future climate may impact new developments and existing activities, choose both:

  • emission scenarios
  • time horizons.

Emissions scenarios

This guidance adopts emissions scenario framing. This framing describes the projected change under an emissions scenario for a certain time horizon. We used it because it aligns with the format used in VCSR24 emissions scenario framing (explained in section 3.1). It is also familiar to most decision makers who rely on climate projections.

Other frameworks exist to communicate climate projections, such as global warming levels (GWLs). The GWLs framework describes the expected change that will be experienced across the world. This will be felt when a specific level of average warming is reached across the globe. Such as, when average global temperatures reach 2 °C.

The climate we experienced in the past is no longer a good predictor of future climate. Instead, a range of possible emissions scenarios are run through models to explore possible futures.

Emissions scenarios are based on different amounts of GHG emissions in the atmosphere. They are ‘plausible futures’ not predictions.

Whether you are undertaking a qualitative or more detailed assessment:

  • choose at least 2 scenarios to understand the range of plausible outcomes. This helps to deal with some uncertainties from climate change
  • select medium and high emission scenarios. Selecting a high emissions scenario can account for the potential worst-case consequences. Low emissions scenarios are unlikely to provide the full breadth of physical climate risks that may be experienced
  • use emissions scenarios based on internationally recognised climate models and emissions scenarios
  • differences in emissions scenarios are generally small up to 2030 before they start to diverge. Thus, one scenario may be adequate to assess risks for short-lived assets
  • use the full name of the emissions scenario you are using (e.g. SSP3-7.0 or RCP8.5). This is because the description of scenarios can change over time (e.g. low, medium, high or very high). This is because climate science is evolving.

The Victorian Government has a range of low, medium and high emission scenarios in Victoria’s climate projections.

  • VCSR19: Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs):
    • RCP4.5 (medium)
    • RCP8.5 (very high)
  • VCSR24: Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs):
    • SSP3-7.0 (high)
    • SSP1-2.6 (low)
  • Regional summaries – explain the climate projections for different regions of Victoria
  • Victoria’s Future Climate Tool – an interactive portal. It allows direct access and exploration of these climate projections across Victoria.

VCSR24 projections add to projections in VCSR19. They do not replace them. Here’s more information on how VCSR24 and VCSR19 projections compare.

Using scenarios related to your CRFD obligations

You may already be undertaking climate-related scenario analysis if you have CRFD obligations. You may be able to use some of the same scenarios if they help you assess your physical climate risks related to risk of harm. This includes medium and high emission scenarios.

Note: CRFD scenarios consistent with an increase in global average temperature of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels are low emission scenarios. You should not use these to conduct scenario analysis under this guidance.

Time horizons

To understand how much the climate will change in the future, climate modellers compare future climate to past climate. Time horizons (a future time-period) are compared with an historic baseline (a past time-period). This allows the calculation of the amount of change in climate variables over a given period.

Common baseline periods used by climate researchers are 1986 to 2005 and 1995 to 2014. These are used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth and Sixth assessment reports, as well as VCSR19 and VCSR24.

Common future time horizons include 2030, 2050, 2070 and 2090. They model a 20-year period. A 2050 time period represents the climate for 2040 to 2059.

It is generally recommended to select at least 2 time horizons to inform the change in risk over time.

However, this depends on the activity or the expected life of the asset:

  • a short-lived asset with a 5-10 year operation or less may look at a 2030 horizon
  • a medium-lived asset with a 20-year operation may look at 2030 and 2050 horizons
  • an asset with a 100-year expected life may assess physical climate risk using 2050 and 2090 horizons.

Sometimes projections do not exist beyond the expected life of the asset. In this case, the longest projections available should be used.

Choose appropriate emissions scenarios and time horizons to suit your needs and circumstances. Justify your choices in your risk assessment.

Exploring climate change projections for selected timeframes and emission scenarios

How is a given climate variable (e.g. temperature) projected to change (decrease, increase, no change) during the selected time scale (e.g. near to mid-term, long-term) for the medium/high emission scenario?

Sources of information to understand future climate change include:

The VCSR19 and VCSR24 and regional summaries may be all you need if you are undertaking a qualitative assessment. Victoria’s Future Climate Tool may be more useful when you are doing a more detailed quantitative analysis.

Here’s more information for decision-makers with different needs.

You can use the resources listed above to help you consider potential changes to hazards from your activities.

Consider normal and abnormal operations, as well as:

  • cascading impacts where extreme weather events in one sector can have flow-on effects to others. Things like an extreme weather event may cause a loss of power, which may lead to a shutdown of process cooling. This can lead to a fire, explosion, infrastructure damage or chemical release.
  • compounding impacts where extreme weather events happen at the same time or close together. This can produce combined impacts that are worse than the individual events. Such as:
    • fires and floods happening in quick succession
    • heatwaves, drought and bushfires can interact and happen at the same time (VCSR24 p77).

Projections indicate that Victoria’s climate will change. However, it is not possible to determine the exact impacts of climate change at any location or time with complete certainty.

Uncertainty should not be a barrier to taking action to minimise the risks of harm arising from physical climate risks. This is consistent with the precautionary principle under the Act. Using a risk assessment approach helps to deal with some uncertainties associated with climate change.

Chapter 3 and 5 of VCSR24 provides more information on uncertainties associated with future climate change.

Updated

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