Understanding coastal adaptation by Biotext

Climate change is affecting many aspects of our world. The impact of climate change is particularly significant for our coastal regions, which will have to deal with rising sea levels as well as increased temperatures and weather events.

The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility plays an important role in educating Australian councils and communities, especially in coastal regions, about adapting to climate change. They wanted to produce a series of infographics that would help to communicate their key messages.
We worked together with researchers from the National Climate Change Adaptation Authority to identify key concepts that local councils might need to understand when they started to grapple with coastal climate change. These support a number of more complex tools that allow users to assess their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and develop new planning and management approaches to deal with these impacts.

We developed a series of infographics explaining topics such as "What are RCPs?", "Why is sea level rise important?" and "What are the options for adapting to sea level rise?"

With each infographic, we worked on an overarching narrative or information hierarchy, and developed symbols or categories to try and break the information into bite-size chunks. The information and icons were designed to present information clearly and succinctly, and to trigger further action by councils.