Events

A Risk Assessment Specialist Interest Group Initiative
Part of ALGA’s Climate Change Webinar Series

Australia is already experiencing significant changes in climate hazards, with increasing pressures on water resources, ecosystems, infrastructure and communities. For the first time, groundwater security has been formally assessed within a national climate risk framework through Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), providing a nationally consistent picture of how climate hazards, exposure and vulnerability interact to shape groundwater risk now and into the future.

In this webinar, our speakers Vjeko and Rachael will explore:

• How groundwater has been incorporated into Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment, and why a nationally consistent yet system‑sensitive approach was required to reflect groundwater’s inherent heterogeneity.
• The methods and key findings of the groundwater component of the NCRA, including risks associated with coastal saltwater intrusion, vulnerabilities of remote communities, and the role of shallow groundwater in coastal flooding.
• A key methodological innovation of the assessment: representing groundwater system response through recurrence intervals of threshold‑exceedance climate events, rather than direct projections of groundwater levels.
• How three complementary lines of evidence were combined—top‑down climate hazard projections, bottom‑up regional and jurisdictional inputs, and risk‑by‑system reporting—to deliver a robust national assessment.
• Practical guidance on translating national‑scale climate hazard data into system‑scale decision‑making, illustrated through a worked example of the Ti Tree aquifer in the Northern Territory.
• How trade‑offs between salience and credibility shift as climate information moves from national to local scales, and what this means for water planners and practitioners using climate projections in risk assessments.

This webinar forms part of ALGA’s Climate Change Webinar Series and will be particularly valuable for local government water planners, state and territory water resource managers, consulting hydrogeologists and water engineers, catchment management practitioners, and climate risk professionals working across the water sector.

A live question‑and‑answer session will follow the presentation, and the webinar will be recorded for registered attendees.