Whether you are new to climate change, or are looking for guidance on how to adapt to climate impacts, the Wizard can help you to:
- raise your awareness of climate change and adaptation
- access information, tools and resources to help you
- assess your vulnerability to climate change
- make the case for adaptation in your organisation
- develop a climate-resilient project, programme, policy or strategy
- develop and implement a climate change adaptation strategy.
What can’t the Wizard do?
The Wizard will not produce a tailor made climate adaptation strategy at the click of a button. It provides a framework and resources to help you generate information to inform your own adaptation strategy.
If your decision involves major investment or a very long time scale, you should complete a thorough risk assessment using a decision-making framework such as our Risk framework.
How should I use the Wizard?
- Complete all of the tasks in Step 1. Once you have established what you hope to achieve, work through the steps, answering questions and completing the tasks in each step.
- Make sure you have completed each step by referring to the checklists.
- Keep a full record of your responses so that others can understand your decision-making. Use the principles of good adaptation and resources for each step to inform your answers.
- Your responses will form the basis of your climate adaptation strategy and could be used to create a technical appendix to support your climate adaptation strategy.
- As adaptation is a continuous process, you will need to revisit your work to keep it accurate and relevant.
- It is important that you are clear about the information, assumptions and judgements you base your decisions on, so you can monitor and evaluate your strategy (5 Monitor and review).
What resources will I need to complete the Wizard?
Completing the Wizard involves working with colleagues and partners to gather information, and requires little expenditure unless your assessment reveals a need to commission further research.
Once you have assembled your team, a start-up meeting to clarify the aims, objectives and desired outcomes of the process is recommended.
Three further half-day workshops will probably be needed for Steps 2, 3 and 4, supported by interim work as required.
Reading through the Wizard takes about 2 hours.
Completing the tasks can take weeks or even months, depending on the availability of your team, the complexity of the information you need, and data or information availability.
Implementing your adaptation measures and monitoring their effectiveness is an on-going process – the time frame could run into years, depending on the scale of your project.
The costs of implementing your chosen adaptation measures are a separate issue, as these will depend on the outcome of your assessment.