Past, present and future landscapes: understanding alternative futures for climate change adaptation of coastal settlements and communities
This document examines the past and present drivers of landscape change in north-east New South Wales, and designs and analyses several scenarios for the future in order to provide a quantifiable understanding of adaptation towards more resilient landscape futures that will minimize future climate event impacts on the basis of land use planning decisions that might be taken. The application of the proposed techniques is intended to provide powerful visualization for a range of long term planning outcomes relevant to governance and policy settings.
The document addresses the following objectives: (i) to develop spatial analysis and visualization tools to examine future trends of settlement and social patterns; (ii) to provide a clear quantitative understanding of current settlement trends and their future trajectories; (iii) to design and test several alternative landscape futures as adaptive strategies reducing vulnerability of settlements and communities to predicted climate change events; (iv) by application to a case study area, to demonstrate application and transferability of the techniques used to other contexts and landscapes, and demonstrate the integration and synthesis capabilities of these techniques; (v) to develop and demonstrate one solution to the temporal inconsistency in climate change vulnerability studies; and (vi) to provide an integrated approach to better guide current planning and policy decisions for adaptation that will provide future resilience.
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