Assessing the comprehensiveness and vertical coherence of climate change action plans: The case of Australia

Climate change is an undeniable reality, prompting governments worldwide to devise strategies to avoid or reduce its adverse impacts. Ensuring the effectiveness of these strategies is crucial; they must be both comprehensive and coherent to minimize trade-offs. While substantial research has focused on assessing climate policy coherence within a single level of government (horizontal coherence), there is a relative scarcity of studies examining coherence between different levels of government (vertical coherence). This study adapts an evaluation framework from the literature and transforms it into two distinct assessment frameworks: one for evaluating the comprehensiveness and the other for assessing the vertical coherence of Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs) from three levels of government (local, state, and national) in Australia. Adaptation and mitigation plans were assessed separately for five local government areas in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, and their respective states: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. National government plans received higher average comprehensive scores (83%) than state (75%) and local (71%) CCAPs. High coherence was observed between national and state levels, with significant variations between state and local levels. Sydney-New South Wales exhibited the highest coherence (90%), while Perth-Western Australia scored the lowest (35%). Key issues identified include a lack of exclusive climate change funding body and an inadequate assessment of vulnerability profiles in various plans. These findings provide insights for designing more comprehensive and integrated policy actions across multiple government levels. The refined frameworks can be applied to test the comprehensiveness and coherence of CCAPs in other contexts at various scales.