WSAA’s Executive Director Adam Lovell has announced WSAA’s participation in the Australian infrastructure adaptation platform, the Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI). 

Expanding on the technology behind the ground breaking AdaptWater tool developed by Climate Risk and Sydney Water, the more powerful XDI Platform now assesses and quantifies extreme weather climate change impacts on a wide range of utility assets – including water and waste water infrastructure, power lines, roads, rail, houses and local government infrastructure.

Adam Lovell said, "Building on our sector's early leadership in quantifying the impacts of climate, I’m now pleased to announce that the water sector will have royalty free access to the climate impact identification and adaptation cost benefit capabilities of the XDI Platform". WSAA members wishing to use the system will be joining users from government agencies from Victoria, NSW and Queensland.  

The XDI Platform uses high speed risk engines to process engineering and climate data to compute the risks to assets from flood, bushfire, soil contraction, coastal inundation and wind storms from today through to 100 years into the future – deep into a climate changed world.  The XDI Platform is able to analyse thousands of assets at a time to find those at risk, assess the costs of damage and probabilities of service disruption and then provide the cost-benefit-analysis of adaptation measures.   The same risk engines are currently in use by corporate and government agencies across Australia as well as helping health service providers in Canada.

"Our aim is to achieve a safe and resilient climate future for the end users of infrastructure in Australia and around the world.  There’s nothing more important than our water and waste water systems; we know without well planned adaptation it will be significantly affected by climate change” said Rohan Hamden, XDI CEO.  "We look forward to working with WSAA to help identify at risk assets for the water industry and prove that innovative approaches to resilience are cost effective."

31 Oct 2018

Sandi Kolbe

Sandi Kolbe

Communications Manager