Climate change adaptation resource

Resilient and durable infrastructure is predicated on its designers and managers having a solid understanding of the conditions that it will face over its useful life, which is typically from 20 to over 100 years.

Climate change and its resulting impacts have the potential to shorten the life of infrastructure, and the impact on any individual asset will be determined by existing load capacity and how easily it can be adapted to meet changes in environmental conditions. The BECCA Wiki aims to provide engineers and other professionals with the information required to confidently make efficient and effective decisions today for infrastructure being built tomorrow.

The BECCA Wiki was developed by the Australian Security Research Centre* (ASRC), with financial support from the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) under the Australian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Program - an Australian Government initiative to increase the preparedness of Australia for the impacts of climate change. The Advanced Protective Technologies for Engineering Structures (APTES) group at Melbourne University assisted with technical support.

The idea for the BECCA Wiki fell out of an earlier project, also supported by the Australian Government, in which the ASRC developed several very detailed handbooks and training courses in climate change adaptation for engineering staff in the electricity and railways sectors. Information on the impacts of climate change on the built environment and on practical options for responding to it were really just emerging, and most of the necessary technical information was in technical and scholarly journals and reports and, therefore, relatively hard to find. Having done all the research work to discover the likely impacts and available adaptation options, we wanted a way to disseminate it further, and to update it as the body of knowledge in climate change adaptation increased. A wiki seemed like the perfect solution.

The ASRC, therefore, developed a comprehensive taxonomy of environmental variables and key parameters that specifically allows the classification of the engineering impacts of climate change on a range of assets, resources and systems. This taxonomy is used within the BECCA Wiki, with impacts and adaptation options being grouped together under the four key environmental variables of water, atmosphere, soil, and plant and animal biodiversity.

Importantly, the Wiki contents are referenced, wherever possible. We have tried to locate authoritative sources for all the content and to reference these sources so that others also can find them. The contents of the Wiki are not ideas or speculation – it’s not a blog or an opinion site - but are based on detailed analysis using current research from authoritative sources, such as academic and technical journals and government reports.

While the DCCEE provided support for the development of the Wiki, maintenance and expansion of the content will occur through the contributions of Wiki users, who can register to be able to create and edit pages on the BECCA Wiki. The editing process is similar to that used in Wikipedia and other wikis, and requires the use of some simple codes to format the text. Edits can usually be done quite simply by copying the existing code and text, then altering the words.

One way in which the BECCA Wiki differs from Wikipedia is that, in the BECCA Wiki, pages are not visible to the general public until they are validated and approved by an authorised reviewer. The purpose of this step is to ensure that the Wiki contents remain authoritative over time. At the moment, there are only a small number of authorised reviewers, but we would welcome others joining this team.

Anyone who would like to use, add to, or review the contents of the BECCA Wiki can go to http://wiki.climatechangeadaptation.org.au/tiki-index.php.

At a time when codes, standards and professional practice mostly do not incorporate climate change impact projections, the Wiki provides:

• a compilation of leading-edge best practice in infrastructure adaptation
• a central and accessible location in which to store documents which can be used to undertake climate change adaptation activities
• better and more comprehensive information with which to improve the quality of adaptation analysis
• an opportunity for practitioners to contribute to developing adaptation knowledge.

* Athol Yates (BEng, MA Public Policy) is the Executive Director of the Australian Security Research Centre. He developed the content of the handbooks and the BECCA Wiki. His areas of expertise are critical infrastructure protection and infrastructure interdependencies. He is a public policy specialist who worked for many years at Engineers Australia, where his focus was on critical infrastructure protection.