• Energy Research

AbstractIncreasing awareness of the risks to coastal communities and infrastructure posed by sea level rise and possible climate-induced changes to the frequency and intensity of catchment flooding events have triggered a large number of studies that have assessed the risk, and developed a prioritisation of actions. These prioritised action recommendations are typically encapsulated in climate adaptation plans and pathways documents, risk reduction strategies, and climate action plans. These studies typically involve a vulnerability assessment task and an action prioritisation task, often performed in the same study. Most of the focus on research and method development over recent decades has been on the first task that aims to quantify the vulnerability of coastal communities and infrastructure. It is argued here that as a result of this emphasis on assessing vulnerability, at the cost of adequate consideration of response actions, along with the linear ‘fix and forget’ management approach to climate adaptation, has led to a lack of uptake in coastal climate adaptation studies and strategies. To this end the aim of the work presented here is to highlight common shortfalls in this fix and forget approach and in particular in the response prioritisation task. Ways that these shortfalls can be avoided, based on knowledge from decision theory, are presented.

Abstract Investigations into interactions between suspended bivalve farms and the marine environment generally focus on effects to the seafloor beneath farms. This is appropriate in situations where the level of development will be determined by the ability of the growing environment to absorb waste products, such as in the case for finfish culture operations. By contrast, sea-based suspended bivalve culture development is more often controlled by the ability of the water-column environment to supply particulate food material. Therefore, there is a need to develop methodologies and frameworks for assessing the ‘scope for growth’ of bivalve culture, and the level of environmental interactions associated with particular development levels. The work presented here details a set of functional performance indicators that can be used to assess the level of interactions between the culture and the water-column growing environment, and also the farmed biomass with respect to carrying capacity milestones.

As global climate mitigation actions increasingly appear to be unable to curb global emissions, there has been a corresponding increase in climate adaptation planning undertaken by governments and communities. Along with an increasing number of adaptation studies, there has been an increasing complexity of adaptation studies as practitioners attempt to plan the adaptation of whole communities, cities and in some cases nations. These studies are commonly underpinned by increasingly complex climate change vulnerability studies that also attempt to encompass concepts such as resilience and adaptive capacity. Owners and operators of infrastructure assets and networks also need to consider climate change. This need has been met by an increasing number of climate change risk and adaptation studies of major infrastructure. The approaches used for these assessments are commonly derived from assessments of whole communities and policy development studies, and apply terminology that is often inconsistent with estab...

The effectiveness of managing fisheries through the allocation of catch rights, including Individual Transferrable Quota's (ITQs), has been the subject of a number of recent reviews. Inspection of these reviews suggests that the effectiveness of ITQ and similar catch rights schemes in meeting single species sustainability objectives differs from their effectiveness in meeting broader Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management objectives, especially in terms of managing effects on associated and dependent species and habitats. This should not be a surprise, given the attributes of rights-based neoliberal market policy instruments, as discussed here.

Participation in the activity of coral reef restoration is growing globally. This is in response to the ongoing loss of corals occurring as a result of warming oceans and local stressors, often from changes to land-uses in reef catchments. Concurrently, efforts to increase the scalability of current restoration practices and develop methods that can be applied at regional scales are ramping up, which, along with reductions in global emissions and changes to catchment land-use practices, are all required to reduce the impacts to reefs. However, new methods alone will not automatically lead to regional-scale restoration. This is because reef restoration activities are implemented by people, and people arrange themselves within organisations of various forms. Such organisations, along with the application of technology, underpin restoration supply chains and therefore restoration activities. Hence, activating the nexus of organisations with technology to apply new methods will be key to unlocking regional restoration capacity, and the area of reefs restored.

Abstract It can be argued that there is presently a disparity between the theory of coastal climate change adaptation and the large-scale or mass implementation with respect to adaptation to sea level rise. From a theoretical perspective, rising sea levels will effectively move the coastline landward and hence the most seaward parts of the built environment, which often feature the highest physical asset value and intensity and hence economic density, will become inundated more often and therefore perhaps need to be relocated landward under the guidance of planned retreat policies. By contrast, evidence of active large-scale planned retreat policies being developed and implemented is sparse, and often being rejected in favour of coastal protection strategies. It is argued here that this lack of uptake of coastal retreat strategies is partially a result of a phenomena coined here as ‘asset anchoring’ where major community infrastructure acts to anchor seaside communities in place and inhibit the implementation of coastal retreat strategies.

Abstract Marine policymakers are facing increasing calls to consider the resilience of communities that rely on coastal and marine ecosystem goods and services, and the resilience of natural systems themselves. These calls are in response to increasing threats to coastal communities from external factors such as coastal hazards, possibly associated with climate change, reductions in natural capital often caused by over-fishing and invasive species, and drivers that act to change local and regional economic conditions leading to changes in employment and inequality. However, most communities have had little experience in explicitly managing for resilience. Similarly, our understanding of the factors that make a natural or social system resilient is also somewhat limited. Furthermore, there is a lack of consensus-based definitions and performance measures for assessing resilience. These factors, along with other barriers, will need to be overcome before effective resilience-based management can be implemented.

The design and construction of the built environment requires explicitly addressing the risk-resilience tradeoff – too weak and the structure may fail, too strong and it will result in excess capacity, cost and embodied energy. This tradeoff is generally managed through the establishment of, and compliance with building standards and codes that often specify the exact methodology by which design parameters shall be calculated from environmental measurements of wind speeds, wave heights, flood levels and other environmental variables. Furthermore, these standards commonly legislate that historical data be used to calculate these design parameters. However, climate science has revealed that in some, if not many cases, these historical datasets may not be representative of future conditions and thus using historical data to develop design parameters for future long-lived infrastructure may increase the likelihood that the risk-resilience tradeoff becomes inadvertently skewed. Hence we now have a conundrum in...