However, South Dunedin Future programme manager Jonathan Rowe told Otago regional councillors the four-year work programme would not necessarily produce a large capital project that needed a lot of external funding.
The programme itself was not about coming up with "a whole lot of adaptation stuff" for the low-lying suburb, requiring a budget for projects outside normal operations at the regional council or its project partner, the Dunedin City Council, Mr Rowe said.
It would produce a framework for a range of council departments "in a way that starts to weave in climate adaptation into their day-to-day work".
"In that way ... you start to turn the supertanker around that is the two councils."
Both councils this month gave the work the go-ahead; both had also earlier approved their share of funding for the $920,000 a-year programme in their respective long-term plans.
Nevertheless, the funding for any major projects suggested by the programme was at the forefront of the discussion at the regional council last week, as were "practical solutions".
Councillor Bryan Scott said he was interested in practical solutions and he wanted to know the point at which they would be discussed.
Consideration of at least part of South Dunedin’s now unused Forbury Park for a wetland was a well- documented opportunity, he said.
Ideally, out of the framework that Mr Rowe’s team created, the council could be in a position to take advantage of any opportunities as they arose "such as Forbury Park".
"In my view, the sooner this happens the better," he said.
Mr Rowe said by the middle of next year, the programme should produce a high-level list of adaptation options.
The natural hazards work by the regional council provided the basis for the programme.
On top of that was the low-lying suburb’s "socio-economics characteristics".
A third layer of the programme would be adaptation options, he said.
"In the next 18 months to two years, I would think the programme would be able to have a material impact," Mr Rowe said.
Providing an example to Cr Scott, Mr Rowe said the city council property team recently sought advice on potentially purchasing property in South Dunedin.
While the South Dunedin programme team was not as far down the track as it would need to be to make specific recommendations, it could provide general observations.
"If the property has a number of DCC properties around it, we would see that as higher priority, because then you could get a larger cluster and that would make a larger area that you might then use at a later stage as transitioning that land use to, say, a green space," Mr Rowe said.
"So if it was a council housing development and it comes up for renewal, you might say ‘OK, well we’re going to look at an option of — instead of renewing it, we might transition that to a green space and look at another green space in another area of South D that is low risk, and we might develop that into housing and get new modern housing’."
He said the sale of Forbury Park was not exactly in his "patch", but he had fed similar views to Cr Scott into that process.
