The Planning and Action Review was designed to understand the characteristics of each municipality and to understand their adaptive capacity relative to better practice. This was done through a series of steps that commenced with a better practice review, to identify how councils could and should be responding. A health check was undertaken to provide a snapshot of the current adaptive capacity of each council, and this formed the basis for the resilience actions included in each Council’s Resilience Roadmap. Across the board, the health check identified the lack of embedding of climate adaptation into decision-making processes. Few have considered broader climate risks or considered how these risks should be factored into strategic and operational governance, processes and documentation.

Greater effectiveness of any future actions could be achieved through a strong governance, risk and stakeholder engagement process. The importance of these processes is highlighted in the discussion of the regional priority projects in Section 9, as they must also be considered in the context of undertaking projects and actions on a regional scale.