South Dublin County Council have established an internal working group to identify specific services that may be impacted by climate change. Through their work, the group are reviewing fluvial and pluvial mapping, and flood risk.

In collaboration with the Climate Action Regional Offices (CARO), Climate Ireland has developed a semi-quantitative climate risk assessment methodology for use by local authorities. The main objective of the work was to develop a robust, replicable and transparent set of guidelines that can be used to assess the risks of climate impacts across different local authority assets and functions. The impacts investigated are some of those that local authorities have already been facing. The semi-quantitative climate risk assessment (SQCRA) methodology developed is aligned with the IPCC climate risk framework. The SQCRA methodology has six stages that must be implemented to produce the final risk assessment. The stages are:

Stage 1 - Risk Screening

Stage 2 - Impact Chain Development

Stage 3 - Indicator Identification and Ranking

Stage 4 - Combining Risk Components

Stage 5 - Risk Outputs

Stage 6 - Interpreting and Evaluating the Findings 

In addition to developing guidelines for implementing a semi-quantitative climate risk assessment, three illustrative case studies were prepared to illustrate its practical implementation. The case studies investigated were

(1) risk of road degradation during heatwave events,

(2) risk of flooding to social housing, and

(3) risk of fluvial flooding to heritage assets.

Workshops were held on 11th November 2021 followed by a further online session on 10th June 2022.