The Global Climate Risk Assessment Tool project is a world-first initiative to provide climate risk assessment data and decision support for taxa listings in PlantSearch for arboreta, botanic gardens and other users. The Climate Change Alliance of Botanic Gardens is the lead organisation working closely with project partners BGCI, University of Tasmania and Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. These organisations along with the International Association of Botanic Gardens have also provided direct funding or in-kind support to enable this project to proceed.

We need your expertise to refine the working prototype of the Climate Risk Assessment Tool. Online interactive workshops of about an hour each via zoom (am and pm) are planned for the 25 February 2021 (We will seek to accommodate time-zone differences as best we can).

Please submit your Expression of Interest to attend these free workshops by 12 February 2020 to peter.symes@rbg.vic.gov.au

Note that the demand to attend these sessions is high and we may need to cap numbers to respond to your feedback and questions during the workshops, so please register early!

We also invite you and your organisation to become members of the Climate Change Alliance of Botanic Gardens (over 300 members across 87 countries) so that you can access additional benefits into the future:

• climate risk assessment tools and resources
• a global pool of diverse expertise and support
• increased community profile
• enhancements to skills and techniques to identify and manage climate change impacts

Appendix 1

Outcomes of the Climate Risk Assessment Tool to date include:

• Plant taxonomy has been validated and 17.7 million GBIF records have been linked to 48,481 distinct taxa
  3,673 institutional gardens in the BGCI PlantSearch database have had their spatial location verified using google maps geocoding (finding spatial coordinates from addresses)
  
• Climate variables have been determined for GBIF and urban plant records, and current and future climate variables have been determined for all gardens
  
• Climate change scenarios such as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) have been adopted as outlined in the ARC6 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scenarios selected are SSP2 in 2040-2060 and SSP3 in 2080-2100. These correspond to a moderate, emissions-limited scenario and a business-as-usual scenario.