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.