While natural disasters can be caused by a single extreme event, such as heavy rainfall leading to flash flooding in a localised area, large natural disasters are often the result of a complex interaction between several events. In these situations, natural disasters may occur in either singular or separate regions, and can occur concurrently or in sequence. This combination of hazards is referred to as a multi-hazard compound event.
Leaders and representatives from across Tasmania's emergency services and other stakeholder groups were engaged with the local research community in a workshop setting to explore this topic and a scenario based approach was developed for assessing the likelihood of particular compound events, possible methods by which this information could be integrated into existing natural hazard risk management approaches, and projections of how these probabilities and risks could change in the future. These methods have been applied to several Tasmanian case studies. Quantitative analysis has been carried out using the Climate Futures for Tasmania ensemble of dynamically downscaled CMIP5 GCMs together with the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA).