A Natural Hazards Atlas for Tasmania: a major new project for Climate Futures

The Climate Futures team, working with researchers from the School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, has begun the stakeholder consultation for its new Natural Hazards for Tasmania project.

Over the next few months, the Natural Hazards Atlas Team will be meeting with hazards managers across the state to consult on their climate-driven data and information needs. The team will be holding a series of workshops, one-to-one interviews, and has published a survey to ask Tasmanian stakeholders about their Natural Hazards information needs.

Information about natural hazards is essential in a changing climate. Although much of this information exists, it not always accessible or a comprehensible to stakeholders without technical knowledge. However, for effective adaptation planning, natural hazards information needs to be available in a widely understood, open access format.

​To fill this information gap, the Natural Hazards Atlas for Tasmania will provide comprehensive information on seven natural hazards (bushfire, wind, heatwave, storm, flood, sea level rise, compound hazards) all of them closely associated with changes to our current climate. The precise format of the atlas and associated hazards information will be informed by the community consultation that is currently underway.

​The project will use an ‘atlas’ approach to map natural hazards information at locally meaningful scales across Tasmania. We envisage that the online atlas will be accompanied by a range of communication translation outputs, including printed summary information for regions and a smartphone app, making natural hazards data and information accessible across Tasmanian user groups and facilitating informed risk and resilience planning.

At the same time as the community consultation for the Natural Hazards Atlas, Climate Futures is also undertaking a needs analysis for updated climate projections for Tasmania, on behalf the Tasmanian State Government’s Climate Change Office. Stakeholders will therefore be consulted about their climate data and information needs, as well as their information needs in relation to natural hazards.

We invite anyone who is called on to use information about natural hazards or climate change in the course of their work to complete the project’s stakeholder consultation survey which can be found here: https://utas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eeqjAe0G3NOt9Hg

The online web platform for the Natural Hazards Atlas will be established during 2025. In the meantime, updates will be reported here on the Climate Futures website.

This Disaster Ready Fund project is funded by the Australian Government.