In 2015 the NSW Government set out to identify the current level of agency preparedness for managing climate change risks to their assets, infrastructure and service delivery. This was the first time that NSW Government agencies had been surveyed with the intent of establishing their level of progress and comparing their approaches to good practice climate change risk management. We were also interested in understanding the challenges agencies had encountered in attempting to manage climate change risks and capture opportunities.

To do this we codified a number of frameworks into a survey against which we could evaluate individual agency progress, good practice and organisational capacity and held a workshop with agencies to identify barriers and enablers of actions.

With this information we are now in a position to design a program of work that enhances NSW Government preparedness through implementing actions that take into account:

• the varying levels of agency progress;
• the varying levels of agency capacity;
• where improvements in practice are needed most; and
• the inter-relationship between barriers, enablers and agency capacity.

This information will also act as a baseline against which we can monitor improvements in NSW Government agency preparedness and attribute these improvements to the work program and thereby evaluate the effectiveness of the work program.