Climate change adaptation: Governance, finance and implementation

This project builds and shares knowledge and experience of implementing climate change adaptation by:

Supporting and facilitating locally-led adaptation to climate impacts in Australia and the Pacific region with specialist skills in governance, management, law, finance and climate science.
Providing regular information roundtables to practitioners in government and industry, as well as academics, that share knowledge and understanding of adaptation implementation from Australia and internationally.
Undertaking new multidisciplinary research into adaptation risk analysis, planning, financing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and tracking progress of adaptation in Australia, the region and internationally.
Contributing to policy development on adaptation in Australia through submissions to inquiries and other activities.

Established in 2024, the project has been building a multidisciplinary team by drawing on expertise from Monash Business School, including the Department of Banking and Finance and the Pacific Action for Climate Transitions centre, as well as Monash Law School, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21^st Century, and Value Advisory Partners.

The project is being developed in close collaboration with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in the United States and particularly NAPA’s Extreme Weather Resilience Hub.

Researchers

Michael Spencer, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Impact Labs, Monash Business School
Ailie Gallant, Chief Investigator, ARC Centre for Weather of the 21^st Century
Tamara Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer, Monash Law School
Ozlem Dursun de Neef, Senior Lecturer, Banking & Finance, Monash Business School
Gordon Noble, Adjunct Research Fellow, Impact Labs, Monash Business School
Janet Stanley, School of Design, University of Melbourne
John Marinopoulos, Founding Partners, Value Advisory Partners
Nic Mesic, Founding Partner, Value Advisory Partners

International advisory panel

Daniel Guttman – Co-Chair, International Affairs Standing Panel, National Academy of Public Administration
Mark Pisano – Co-Chair, Intergovernmental Systems Standing Panel, National Academy of Public Administration
Taylah Bland, Fellow on Climate and Environment, Asia Society Policy Institute, Asia Society
Paul Dargusch, Director, Pacific Action for Climate Transitions (PACT), Monash University

Context

The global temperature goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement are becoming increasingly out of reach. In this context, progress on adapting to the impacts of climate change is becoming more urgent.

Yet climate change adaptation is not happening at the pace and scale required in Australia or internationally. The consequence of failing to mitigate climate change, and adapt to its impacts, is loss and damage. The costs of this failure manifest in various ways including:

Escalating insurance premiums, a growing insurance gap (no insurance or underinsurance), inability to secure finance and business failure.
Growing disaster relief and recovery costs for governments who become, in a sense, insurers of last resort.
Communities struggling to survive due to loss and damage from extreme events, inability to secure insurance or finance, loss of productivity, escalating costs and hardship borne by their most vulnerable members.

This project seeks to mobilise and empower local communities to set well-informed priorities for adaptation action, to build capable local adaptation leadership that can implement a local adaptation plan as well as monitor and evaluate performance, and to access finance to support implementation.

The reduction of climate-related risks will have flow-on effects to access to insurance and finance, as well as reduced loss and damage costs for individuals, business and government.

Project focus areas

This project focuses on local districts which may or may not correspond to local government jurisdictions, but share a set of common climate impacts, as well as a common set of values and priorities.
It aims to support the development of polycentric governance for districts so that all interested and affected local voices are heard in determining priorities and implementing adaptation actions.
This includes supporting access to climate science and technology, analysing risks, evaluating priorities and understanding and accessing financing options, implementation and developing monitoring and evaluation metrics.
We draw on available tools and methodologies including the Global Framework for Adaptation that sets out a process and a set of overarching goals for adaptation, Australia’s national risk assessment hazards and other material generated through international, national and state processes.
However, we support the modification of these for local priorities and circumstances. An important element of the project is to support districts to understand and develop adaptation financing options. These include federal and state grants and loans, private loans, access to bonds, options such as tax incremental financing as well as blended finance options.
We will also communicate and support actions by state and federal governments to provide the best policy infrastructure for local adaptation.
Green Lab has developed strong partnerships with academics and practitioners in several countries working on adaptation.
The project has a long-term relationship with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in Washington DC, and has contributed to work of that organisation on adaptation over several years.
We work with NAPA’s Extreme Weather Resilience Hub. In the Pacific we work with Pacific Action on Climate Transitions (PACT); a collaboration between Monash University and Fiji National University and institutions in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Through our colleagues at NAPA, we have links to academics and researchers in China including the Institute of Global Public Policy at Fudan University. Our goal is to both contribute to and learn from the work of our international collaborators.
Green Lab’s adaptation roundtables are held in collaboration with the National Academy of Public Administration and bring international leaders in different aspects of adaptation to the virtual roundtable.
Topics have included finance, institutional constraints, insurance and governance. The roundtables are pitched at practitioners from the public sector, private sector and NGOs as well as academics and researchers.
They aim to share knowledge from people working at the leading edge of adaptation implementation while building a community of adaptation practitioners.
The project undertakes multidisciplinary research into all elements of the adaptation implementation process. It publishes this work in both accessible forms such as the Monash Lens and in academic journals. Publications are listed below.
Contributing to policy development on adaptation is an important part of the project and this is undertaken mainly through submissions to government agencies, multilateral organisations and other institutions engaged in policy development and implementation. Submissions on different aspects of adaptation policy have been made to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water, the Victorian Legislative Council and the Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.

Research outputs

Wither adaptation action, Stanley, J. & Spencer, M., 3 Mar 2025, In: Climate. 13, 3, 20 p., 52.

Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change: A Comparative Study of Governance Processes in Australia, China, and The United States,
Bu, M., Comfort, L. K., Guttman, D., He, C., Jing, Y., Kihslinger, R., Knopman, D., Li, W., Lu, B., Losos, E., Marcus, F., Ouyang, H., Qi, Y., Romano, K., Spencer, M., Stanley, J., Tang, X., Wohlgezogen, F., Xu, J. & Xu, Y. & 3 others, , Apr 2024, Washington D.C.: National Academy of Public Administration. 91 p.

Adaptive governance of large, complex ecosystems - such as the Gippsland Lakes, Spencer, M. & Alexandra, J., 30 Jul 2024, In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 136, 1, 4 p., RS24003.

Report of the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Workshop on Adaptation and Climate Change, Spencer, M., Stanley, J., Wohlgezogen, F. & Zhu-Maguire, I., Aug 2022, Melbourne Vic Australia: Strathbogie Ranges Conservation Management Network. 28 p

Submissions

Submission to the Australian Government Economic Reform Roundtable, Foester, A., Spencer. M., Vines, E., Noble, G., 24 July 2025

Submission to the Victorian Government Climate Change Strategy 2026-30, Spencer, M, 8 April 2025 (for reasons that are not explained, individual submissions have been de-identified hence this is listed as Individual 9)

Submission to the Victorian Legislative Council, Environment and Planning Committee Inquiry into Climate Resilience,
Spencer, M. 25 June 2024

Submission for the UAE – Belém work programme on indicators for the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, Spencer, M., Wohlgezogen, F., Bowen, K. J., Stanley, J., Wyns, A., Alexandra, J., Howden, M. & Foerster, A., 28 Mar 2024

Submission to the Australian Government Treasury Consultation - Climate-related financial disclosure, Foerster, A., Garg, M. & Spencer, M., 21 Jul 2023

Submission to the Australian Government Treasury Consultation on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, Foerster, A., Garg, M. & Spencer, M., 17 Feb 2023

Short articles

From warning to action: The real cost of inaction on disaster resilience, Michael Spencer, Monash Lens, 21 July 2025

Climate adaptation – multi-billion-dollar problem invisible in election 2025, Michael Spencer, Monash Lens, 29 April 2025

How climate change is reshaping real estate and economic geography, Michael Spencer, Monash Lens, 11 February, 2025

COP29: IPCC kicks off Seventh Assessment Report with global expert collaboration, Michael Spencer, Monash Lens, 21 November 2024

COP29: Defining indicators for climate adaptation progress, Michael Spencer, and Anita Foerster, Monash Lens, 1 November 2024

Roundtables

In October 2024, Monash Green Lab commenced hosting a roundtable series on the challenges of implementing strategies to live in a significantly warmer world.

In cooperation with the US National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), the Monash roundtables are bringing together leading international and Australian thinkers from government, business and community sectors. The roundtables provide insights from current work on adaptation and point to areas where further work is required.

View the full series