Project/company overview
The Reef Restoration & Adaptation Program (RRAP), is the world’s largest investment in ecosystem restoration research & development ($260m over 4 years), with the aim to help the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) resist and adapt to the forces of climate change. The reef is a UNESCO World Heritage-listed environmental asset, contributing >$6 billion a year to the Australian economy. As such, the Australian Government is investing $260m on advancing R&D into ‘moonshot’ ideas that can be deployed at scale to help restore and build resilience on the GBR.
Problem
The GBR is a complex interconnected system of reefs, ecosystems, communities and industries. Understanding the highly uncertain impacts of climate change on this broad system is a challenge in and of itself, let alone characterising the merits and ecological and socio-economic value proposition of untested interventions in order to make informed decisions on acting given the inherent uncertainty.
Outcome
Adaptus currently leads the $20m Modelling & Decision Support subprogram, leading a diverse team of 40 scientists, engineers and economists from CSIRO, AIMS, QUT and UQ in designing and developing an operational system to inform ecological and socio-economic understanding of the GBR and facilitate decision making on R&D and deployment. We were also responsible for the original subprogram concept design and implementation roadmap. Adaptus’ role includes:
- Strategic engagement with the Program management team to ensure subprogram delivery aligns with Program objectives and processes, and develop the business case for the Subprogram.
- Subprogram planning, aligning work packages, roles and responsibilities, contracting processes, prior to program commencement.
- Coordinating and ensuring quality of the annual updates to climate projections, and modelling of their impacts on Reef assets, industries, economies, and communities.
- Coordinating and ensuring quality of studies into the risks of climate change for the Reef assets, industries, economies and communities, and examining implications for resilience and adaptation.
- Coordinating research into natural capital valuations, economic value, and their translation into studies and decision making.
- Subprogram management, commercial management, budgeting, reporting, and change management.
- Development of a participatory decision-making framework and process for guiding when, where and at what scale to deploy interventions to maximise benefits, and application of multiple triple-bottom-line cost-benefit analyses to inform understanding of deployment scenarios with the greatest ROI to the Government and its stakeholders.
