Pastures: Dynamics, Economics and Management (Agriculture Issues and Policies)
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Contents:
As noted in the last point, while much climate change adaptation and mitigation activity can usefully be focussed at the farming systems level, this cannot be to the exclusion of other levels of analysis. As shown in Table 1 and other papers in this special issue, RDE on climate adaptation and mitigation can also be usefully targeted at the plant and animal level e.
Similarly, RDE can be targeted at higher integrative levels than farming systems, and other papers in this special issue reflect on such processes, including the building of adaptive capacity at a community and regional level, planning for future landscapes, or transformational adaptation. Terms such as resilience will be more meaningful if the scale and goals of the system being discussed are explicitly stated Klein et al.
The challenges of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change in Australian farming systems demands RDE at all levels and clear thinking on how to move between them. The systems concept of hierarchies and how farming systems fit into this hierarchy Table 1 is more than just semantics or a form of disciplinary demarcation. It is central to our ability to have a meaningful discussion about RDE on adaptation and mitigation. He uses this notion to warn plant physiologists that unless their research could be related to higher levels of agronomy, they risked conducting research that was potentially redundant.
He also cautions that research that has no relationship with lower levels is likely to be descriptive, superficial, and unscientific. Carberry makes a similar point about the need to balance rigor and relevance in farming systems research. At the same time, integrative research on farming systems needs to consider farms in a changing landscape, changing policy initiatives, changing rural communities, commodity prices, and agricultural industries.
Addressing agronomists, Hamblin notes that many of the environmental questions asked by policy makers are at a higher scale than most agricultural scientists are trained at, or comfortable, answering. Similarly, Lane et al. Those authors go on to cite climate change as an example of where there is a mismatch between the scale of the environmental issue and the farm management or even catchment management level, highlighting the need for climate change research on farming to accommodate higher level processes.
In a recent paper revisting the framework, Passioura points to success of working from lower levels such as herbicide tolerance and the insertion of the Bt gene in cotton to kill caterpillars. He contrasts the success of these genetic solutions that target alien organisms e. Bt genes or molecules e. Further, he argues that dialogues between all levels have been essential to the success of insect control and weed management.
While farmers and advisers, like the rest of the community, are asking fundamental questions about the science of climate change, many have moved beyond the basic question of what is climate change and is it real, to asking the more applied question of what should be done. Adapting to climate change and reducing GHG raise many questions at the farming systems level. Some of those frequently posed by farmers and their advisers can be summarised as variants on the following:. What are the risks and opportunities for the farming system from policies to reduce greenhouse gases?
Different aspects of these questions have been refined and addressed in the Farming Future program of the Department of Agriculture Forests and Fisheries Australia, and various strategies from Rural Development Corporations, CSIRO, universities, and state departments. The focus on projections, impacts, adaptation, and mitigation is also consistent with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC working groups and reporting. In the following section, we use these questions to provide a framework to discuss recent developments and emerging issues about the implications of climate change at the farming systems level.
A focus on questions raised by key stakeholders is consistent with Mode 2 science Gibbons et al. The information-seeking Australian farmer has access to broad-scale climate change projections from the third and fourth assessment rounds of the IPCC. Across Australia, temperatures are projected to rise by 0.
INTRODUCTION
The rainfall projections are more uncertain and vary across the country. The frequency and extent of droughts are projected to increase over most of southern Australia. Holper gives an overview of the year history of the Australian Climate Change Science Program and describes the high level positive reviews it has received. Despite this positive feedback, as in other countries and other areas of climate science, there is a mismatch between the spatial and temporal scale provided by climate change projections and that desired by decision makers.
An early response to the question of climate change projections at a scale relevant to farming systems has been an emphasis on higher spatial resolution. Most states in Australia have embarked on some form of downscaling of climate-change projections as a means of narrowing the range of projected changes.
Even with downscaling, the narrowing of rainfall projections remains problematic and users are faced with high levels of irreducible uncertainty. Besides trying to improve climate projections and tools, it is also vital to look for alternatives to prediction. This means that our conventional reliance on prediction as the basis of management needs to be moderated Hulme et al. Sarewitz warns that an overemphasis on climate change projections, especially at a fine scale, can be an impediment to adaptation action, firstly because it could delay action as decision makers wait for the next report, and secondly because it can lead to planning for an unrealistically narrow range of future climates.
Although decision makers prefer a narrow range, there is the danger that the narrowing is an artefact of which climate models are used rather than an accurate representation of possible futures, which can result in maladaptation if acted on cf. Hennessey et al. Others similarly argue that we need to aim for robust adaptation decisions i. This is not an argument against investing in climate science. There are substantial national and international resources invested in downscaling and identifying the best set of climate models, and these will continue to provide a better understanding of climate drivers and valuable information for managers of farming systems.
Nevertheless, an increasing number of agricultural decision makers are starting to prepare for a warmer and water-constrained future, rather than waiting for the next round of projections.
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This means that the chance of two bad seasons in a row changes from one season in nine to one season in four. As shown in an economic analysis by Peck and Adams and social analysis by Rickards and King et al.
Projections can also be supplemented with the use of temporal and spatial analogues Ford et al. Many groups in Australia have used the recent drought as a temporal analogue for a drier future, for example, as has also been done elsewhere e. McLeman et al. The run of very dry seasons on the upper Eyre Peninsula in South Australia was used to identify characteristics of farm enterprises that were sources of resilience Doudle et al.
Ecologists have also long used spatial analogues for future changes, and farmers and advisers naturally look to drier, warmer locations as windows into the future. Temporal and spatial analogues are imperfect, however, and need to be used carefully. While the advantage of temporal analogues relative to spatial analogues is that the soil and farming system is held constant, a limit to this approach is that it is very dependent on the particular run of seasons and how these have interacted with commodity prices.
Australia State of the Environment Report
An advantage of a spatial analogue is that it allows comparisons of farming systems, and importantly, because it is in the present day, there are farmers who can be questioned. Critically, all of these elements—exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity—are, like other elements of the farming system Lev and Campbell , dynamic and so need to be assessed at any point in time.
As a discipline, farming systems research prides itself on accommodating dynamism in the system, until recently it has only had to deal with a variable but stationary climate. This is evident in the widespread use of historical deciles for future planning Hayman and Alexander Adjusting farming systems thinking to a variable and trending climate and identifying how various climatic stimuli affect different components of the system over short- to long-term time scales is thus a new and important challenge. A farming systems perceptive also helps to provide a more realistic perspective on climate change impacts than that provided by climate science or agronomic studies alone.
As discussed by Eckard and Bryan et al. Climatic impacts cascade through existing systems to create waves of non-climatic impacts, some of which may be more influential on a farming system than the climatic stimulus itself Cork In an overview of the costs of climate change on the Australian economy, Garnaut highlights this cascade by referring to four types of impacts. In Table 2 , the examples used by Garnaut are matched with specific examples for farming systems.
Estimating the relative costs of the impact of climate change and balancing this against the cost of mitigation is conceptually, ethically, and empirically difficult Spash ; Stern ; Garnaut Garnaut , notes that while Type 1 impacts are relatively easy to value in a market economy although the initial damage may be hard to estimate , each subsequent impact type is harder to estimate and cost. This does not, however, make them less important.
Misconceptions on drylands and pastoralism
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to look in detail at the issue of costs, the framework of impacts at the level of a whole economy or society presented by Garnaut helps to broaden our discussion here of the impacts on farming systems. Garnaut emphasises that a major cost of climate change is the structural uncertainty it creates Type 3.
The negative impact on farmer investment and productivity of increased uncertainty due to climate change and policies to reduce GHG emissions should not be underestimated. One attempt by Hafi et al. Garnaut also emphasises the importance of Type 4 impacts, which are also far more obtuse than, but equally as important as, more direct climate change impacts on farming.
Examples listed by Garnaut are the loss of rare species or decline in suburban quality of life with easy access to parks and playing fields. Barr has written eloquently of changes occurring in rural communities as a result of a range of different stresses. Climate change is likely to interact with and exacerbate these pre-existing stressors, as well as introducing new ones Rickards Some of the non-market aspects of climate change on the health and wellbeing of rural communities and farming families have started to be documented King et al.
Such impacts cannot be ignored, not the least because they negatively affect the human capital and thus adaptive capacity of those involved. The modelling of the impact of climate change has greatly benefited from the extensive effort in modelling the impact of climate variability in Australia that had been fostered under the Managing Climate Variability Program Hammer et al.
Growth in productivity and yield was made possible thanks to greater milk production, milk preserving techniques such as pasteurization, the achievement of heavier slaughter weights, and methods for faster fattening of the cattle Moser and Brodbeck , Moser Furthermore, the influences of mechanization, fertilizers and improvements in management structures became evident.
Rationalization also favored a differentiated management of pastures and forest leading to land-use segregation and a more binary landscape Rieben By , direct payments had been introduced to motivate mountain farmers to stop producing milk. This resulted in a change in agricultural practices, encouraging the breeding of calves with suckling cows or heifers. A further development in was the introduction of milk quotas, limitations on cattle units per farm, and even subsidies for herd reduction Brodbeck , Stalder As a result, some forest maintenance activities were left out as an economy measure.
Concurrently, the wood economy was severely impacted by the effects of two storms, Vivian in and Lothar in , and is still slowly recovering Schuler The milk price paid to producers decreased linearly between and until it reached the late s price and then stabilized, which corresponded with the number of milk producers Fig. The authors would like to thank Andi Rigling, Robert Huber, and all the persons who agreed to give interviews.
Published here under license by The Resilience Alliance. Go to the pdf version of this article. Kalbermatten, K.
Soil Carbon Sequestration in Grazing Lands: Societal Benefits and Policy Implications
Lannas, T. Adaptation to and mitigation of climate change in Australian agriculture has included research at the plant, animal, and soil level; the farming system level; and the community and landscape level. This paper focuses on the farming systems level at which many of the impacts of a changing climate will be felt. This is also the level where much of the activity relating to adaptation and mitigation can usefully be analysed and at which existing adaptive capacity provides a critical platform for further efforts.
In this paper, we use a framework of nested hierarchies introduced by J.
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Passioura four decades ago to highlight the need for research, development and extension RDE on climate change at the farming systems level to build on more fundamental soil, plant, and animal sciences and to link into higher themes of rural sociology and landscape science. The many questions asked by those managing farming systems can be categorised under four broad headings: 1 climate projections at a local scale, 2 impacts of climate projections on existing farming systems, 3 adaptation options, and 4 risks and opportunities from policies to reduce emissions.