Futures Greater Adelaide 2050: An exploration of disaster risk and the future

This report documents the second phase of Greater Adelaide's "Decision Support System (DSS) for Assessment of Policy & Planning Investment Options for Optimal Natural Hazard Mitigation” project, which incorporated the development of exploratory scenarios to better understand relevant uncertainties, develop strategic capacity in decision makers to consider uncertainties impacting on policies, and provide a better understanding of the value and use of the developed DSS. 

The process looked to discover critical elements relevant to disaster risk reduction and consider how they change into the future. As a method for exploring the future, scenarios were developed considering the changes from 2013 to 2050. Five alternate futures for Greater Adelaide were developed by members of SA’s State Mitigation Advisory Group (SMAG), assisted by the scenarios team at the University of Adelaide and Research Institute for Knowledge Systems. These were subsequently modelled and results of the qualitative and quantitative scenarios are presented in this report.

The results presented in this report particularly emphasise the role of exposure in the calculation of disaster risk. Managing exposure to risk is one of the most powerful mechanisms to reduce future risk and in urban environments it is critical to consider future land developments with global population projections estimating an increase of 400 million exposed to coastal and river flooding between 2010 and 2050.