Physical climate risk assessment

Most physical climate risk products return a score between one and five without the method behind it. That score then has to be defended in an audit committee meeting.

Screening is a triage exercise. The useful output is a shortlist: which sites justify an engineering study, and which do not.

Hazards and data sources

Screening prompt

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Which of our sites move from moderate to high flood risk between SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 at 2050?

Site	LGA	SSP2-4.5	SSP5-8.5
DC-014 Wagga	Wagga Wagga	Moderate	High
RT-221 Lismore	Lismore	High	High
OF-006 Maribyrnong	Maribyrnong	Moderate	High

Flood. Council and state flood studies, flood planning areas, and recorded historical extents. Coverage is uneven across Australia. The assessment reports the gap per site rather than filling it.

Bushfire. Geoscience Australia's national bushfire boundaries plus state bushfire-prone land mapping, combined with slope and vegetation from the national elevation and land cover datasets.

Coastal. Digital Earth Australia Coastlines gives measured shoreline change since 1988. Sea level rise projections extend it forward.

Extreme heat. SILO gridded observations for the baseline, and CMIP6 downscaled projections for days above thresholds under each scenario.

Scenarios

AASB S2 requires at least two scenarios. Most Australian reporters use SSP2-4.5 with SSP5-8.5. Horizons default to 2030, 2050 and 2070. The scenario set and the horizons are parameters, and both appear in the methodology appendix with the results.

Output

A per-site record with a hazard rating, the layer that produced it, the distance to the nearest hazard boundary, and a confidence flag reflecting the quality of the underlying study. Portfolio rollups aggregate that. The map view shows the parcel against the hazard layer so the join can be checked.

Where a site has no usable study, it is flagged as unassessed rather than given a rating.