CLIMATE change science has been focused on science, not people; on negative outcomes, not opportunities; and on economy-wide and nation-wide changes rather than at the level of the farm business.
That needs to change, leading CSIRO scientist Mark Howden said this week.
Dr Howden, who leads CSIRO’s Adaptive Primary Industries, Enterprises and Communities stream, told the Climate Adaptation Futures conference that the scientific focus to date “has provided few practical options for policy makers or other decision makers”.
“In the past most of our science has been climate-centric; it hasn’t been human-centric. It’s identified the problem, but not the solutions.”
Agriculture makes decisions in timeframes of one to 10 years, Dr Howden said. The benchmark years in climate prediction, 2050 and 2100, don’t have any relevance to current management.
But possibly the biggest obstacle to change has been the scientific and political focus on negative outcomes.
If the prognosis for a region was warmer and drier, the story that accompanied the prediction emphasised the prospect for problems like increased drought, wind erosion, or reduced carbon sequestration.
If increased rainfall is likely, there are warnings about flooding, increased salinisation, increased pest and disease risk.
Tallying up the papers presented at the Climate Adaptation Futures conference, Dr Howden found that 65 per cent focused on the negatives and only 12 per cent on positives. The remainder were neutral.
“We have a situation that continually tells us that our past climate is the best of all possible worlds,” Dr Howden said.
“We have an attachment to that historical climate. To detach people from that is a pretty significant challenge.”
Dr Howden aims to reinvent science’s engagement with agriculture along new lines.
“Clearly, there have to be opportunities. Change doesn’t always bring only negatives.”
“We need to be framing our science to be dealing with the opportunities, because it’s clear that our stakeholders are doing this already.”
For instance, in the south-east of South Australia, a high rainfall zone that has historically been too wet for cropping, farmers responded to lower rainfall between 2003 and 2008 by increasing their cropping area by 52,000 hectares - often making better returns on crops than from the area’s traditional grazing systems.
Adaptation to changing climatic conditions does not have to be all-or-nothing, Dr Howden said.
First stage adaptation within existing farming systems in response to a 2 degrees Celsius rise might involve changing crop varieties, planting times or row spacings.
Under further climate pressure - around a 3C rise - farmers might alter their farming systems by diversifying, using different genetics or changing the supply chain.
Ultimately, there is “transformational adaptation”--fundamentally changing the product mix, or changing locations.
Dr Howden said at each stage, science can provide the information and supporting technology to help farmers adapt.
The agriculture sector can help science deliver the answers it wants, Dr Howden later told Rural Press, by accepting climate change as a real and almost certainly unstoppable phenomenon.
“If there’s an acknowledgement of climate change, agriculture can take longer-term decisions that recognise the prospect of change.
“And if there’s acknowledgement that climate change is virtually unstoppable, it changes the balance of research. Instead of saying that we need to breed wheat for both warmer and cooler conditions, you can automatically drop out with a high degree of confidence the cool side of the program.
“Acknowledgement of climate change should mean better farm management and better design of science policy.”
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