Climate Change: Science and Solutions for Australia

  1. Overview
  2. Foreword
  3. Contents, List of authors, Acknowledgements
  4. Introduction
  5. Chapter 1: Observations of global and Australian climate
  6. Chapter 2: Climate and greenhouse gases
  7. Chapter 3: Future Australian climate scenarios
  8. Chapter 4: Climate change impacts
  9. Chapter 5: Adaptation: reducing risk, gaining opportunity
  10. Chapter 6: Adapting to heatwaves and coastal flooding
  11. Chapter 7: Adapting agriculture to climate change
  12. Chapter 8: Greenhouse gas mitigation: sources and sinks in agriculture and forestry
  13. Chapter 9: Mitigation strategies for energy and transport
  14. Chapter 10: Reducing energy demand: the imperative for behavioural change
  15. Chapter 11: Responding to a changing climate
  16. Endnotes, Index

Chapter 7: Adapting agriculture to climate change

Page 11 of 16

Cattle with farmer in background. By Dr Chris Stokes and Dr Mark Howden

There is a national imperative to equip Australian agriculture to be prepared to adapt to climate change. Some agricultural communities, industries, or regions will have a greater capacity to adapt than others: understanding their constraints and incentives is important in ensuring that they do so successfully.

Overview

An early part of adapting agriculture to climate change involves helping communities to understand why adaptation is a needed part of today’s vision of the future and therefore of their management strategies.

Successful adaptation to climate change will require flexible, risk-based approaches that deal with future uncertainty and provide strategies that are robust enough to cope with a range of possible local climate outcomes and variations.

Many climate adaptation options for agriculture are similar to existing ‘best practice’ and good natural resource management, and do not require farmers to make radical changes to their operations and industries in the near term. These options can, and should be, prioritised as part of a ‘no regrets’ or win–win strategy for agriculture because they will provide immediate and ongoing benefits as well as preparing the sector for climate change.

Discover more about Adapting agriculture to climate change:

Or download the whole book (two options):

  • Portable Document Format [PDF 14.2 MB]  [optimised for computer screen]
  • EPUB version from CSIRO PUBLISHING [optimised for use with mobile and eReading devices].  

Related links