In January 2020, Greater Dandenong City Council joined a growing number of cities around Australia in declaring a ‘Climate and Ecological Emergency’, committing us to emergency action on climate change. Council formally adopted its Climate Emergency Strategy 2020-30 in August 2020, which provides a comprehensive framework for urgent climate action. One of the key areas of action prioritised is the embedding of climate change consideration into all of Council’s operational and decision-making processes.
Council’s City Improvement Program (CIP) was an effective place to start, with 177 bids for funding for infrastructure and asset projects received in the 2020/21 financial year.
The objective of developing a climate change self-assessment method for evaluating CIP projects is to better incorporate consideration of climate change into the CIP bidding process. This is in addition to existing assessment criteria that bids are evaluated on. Project bids are assessed on how well the project responds to climate change and how well the 10 themes of Council’s Sustainability Strategy 2016-30 are represented.
One of the challenges in developing the self-assessment mechanism was differing levels of climate change literacy across the body of service managers submitting bids, as well as the diversity of bids being submitted. The self-assessment tool would need to be accessible and intuitive for all staff, while being able to accommodate bid diversity between a $6,000 new maternal health room fit out and a $600,000 streetscape upgrade. It needed to be both robust but not time-consuming (recognising some service managers submit dozens of bids) and be scalable based on the scope of the works proposed.
To understand how best to respond to the above criteria, the project working group conducted extensive internal consultation with all service managers who had submitted a bid in the last year. Through a survey, one-on-one and team discussions, as well as trial and error using previous bids as examples, the CIP Climate Change Self-Assessment Mechanism was born.
Encapsulated in a simple Excel spreadsheet, the Self-Assessment Mechanism is intuitive to navigate and contains both instructions and further resources to guide staff in completing their assessment. The tool incorporates smart formulas based on project classification in the background to enable assessors to determine at a glance whether the project meets best practice sustainability requirements.
The Self-Assessment Mechanism addresses the impacts of climate change through the mitigation opportunities, the ability for a project to achieve net zero emissions, and other impacts across ten sustainability themes, including:
To Greater Dandenong’s knowledge, this is the first tool of its kind to address climate mitigation within asset and infrastructure bid funding.