This project has addressed one of the most challenging issues facing today’s society – how best to adapt to a changing climate. The development of the ‘Climate Smart Seaports’ toolkit was designed to support more informed decision-making by seaports, a critical component of Australia’s infrastructure and vital to the future prosperity of the country. Seaports had previously been identified as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change by the NCCARF expert group on settlements and infrastructure. Furthermore, with additional (though relatively limited) refinement, the data, methodologies, and software interface could equally be transferable – and of value - to other infrastructure types.

The tool brings together a range of different climate and non-climate data, and structures this complex information in formats that align closely with general risk management processes (a desire expressed by the stakeholders and potential end-users). This enables climate risks to be integrated or mainstreamed into existing management frameworks. Furthermore, iterative engagement with key stakeholders and experts also ensured that the software interface for the prototype tool is intuitive and easy to navigate.

Close working not only between the disciplinary expertise represented by the climate change adaptation and eResearch teams at RMIT University, but also with numerous data providers and end users, ensured that the prototype tool is a ‘co-generated’ product that is not only robust but also fit for purpose. Given stakeholder interest shown in the tool, further funding is being sought to extend this resource to all regions of Australia and to host it in an RMIT-affiliated cloud to ensure its longer-term sustainability.

Research Champion:

Professor Darryn McEvoy,
Civil, Environmental & Chemical Eng, RMIT University

• This project focused on the potential impacts of climate change on the assets and functioning of seaports. The development of the Climate Smart Seaports toolkit has helped to facilitate a better understanding of the risks and uncertainties associated with a changing climate. This has directly involved the management and re-usability of different types of data, as well as interpreting this information for useful application by end-users. Even though dealing with the specific domain of climate change adaptation, methodological considerations are common to other fields of research, and the way the application has been co-designed and developed would potentially allow application to other areas.



• The technical outcomes of this project are represented by a fully functional online tool developed in Java. It is based on the Spring framework for a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, authentication and security, the Hibernate framework for Object Relational Mapping (ORM) with a MySQL database. Using such frameworks ensure a robust application which sits on widely known and maintained libraries. The solution can be accessed via the web using web browsers, ensuring high accessibility. It provides access to a wide range of data, from past and future climate to engineering computation in a single place, and is connected to feed ANDS’ “Research Data Australia” automatically by generating RIF-CS format.



• This decision-support toolkit can be used in two different ways, for many different use cases: Anonymous users (visitors, not logged in) can browse and view the reports published by others, helping them to understand how useful is the tool by seeing various examples, have a better understanding of the climate risks for specific seaports or regions, and eventually increasing their awareness of how climate change impacts seaports.
  
  Authenticated users (logged in) can create their own reports by gathering data and analyse them. This can be as part of a broad research, a more specific study of a region or of a seaport, or the beginning of a risk assessment process undertaken by seaports authorities themselves. The user characteristics of a researcher are related to different areas of research including climate change adaptation, transport supply chain and logistics, materials engineering related to a marine environment, economics and trade forecasting.



• Project hosted on Google code (description, source code and documentation): https://code.google.com/p/climate-smart-seaports/
  This application is currently hosted in RMIT and was previously available (but no longer) at: http://seaports.eres.rmit.edu.au:8080.
  Please note that this hosting is only temporary, for demonstration purposes. However, we are negotiating with the climate change adaptation team to uptake this application and move it to a more sustainable ITS-managed production environment.
  
  
  
• The tool is divided into seven core elements. These are:
  
  
  
  • The workboard;
  
  
  • Non-climate context;
  
  
  • Observed climate;
  
  
  • Future climate context;
  
  
  • Applications (concrete deterioration modelling, current vulnerability assessment);
  
  
  • Data Summary; and
  
  
  • Report.
  
  
  
  
  The tool allows the user to progress through each of these elements, selecting data parameters that are relevant to their port. Users can also choose to add further port-specific data as required, and add additional analysis if desired.
  
  For more information, consult the full user documentation.