2022 Platform: Adapting to climate change

Please note that this is the Adapting to Climate Change platform we took to the 2022 Election. Please refer to our current platform for our plans for the upcoming election as significant changes may have been made.

Adaptation to climate change varies across Australia, depending on the climatic zone and the agricultural practices at play, whether farms are raising livestock, grains, orchards, stone fruit, wine grapes, fibres, or aquaculture.

By 2050, climate change is projected to halve the irrigated agricultural output of the Murray-Darling Basin region, which currently accounts for 50% of Australia’s irrigated agricultural output by value (about $7.2 billion per year)

This is just one of the economic impacts to the agriculture sector if adaptation is not undertaken, and this will only get worse if the mitigation strategies outlined above are not implemented.

Broadly speaking, adaptation to climate change falls into a number of different categories:

Information & Forecasting

Underpinning all efforts to adapt to climate change is the need for increased ‘resolution’ and quality of data relating to soil quality and composition, soil moisture, rainfall, and temperature. More accurate and more localised data paired with better forecasting models allow farmers to improve their short- and long-term decision-making.

There is a need to align management and finance timeframes with environmental assessment timeframes and alleviate the short term financial pressure to enable landscape managers to develop and implement long term management plans.

• Adoption of an agreed set of metrics to measure progress towards ‘sustainable agriculture’.
• Reporting on our national progress against these metrics.
• Investment in the CSIRO and BOM to improve data, modelling and forecasting across the productive regions of the Australian continent and coastal waters

Farming practices

We need to look at ways to further drive innovation in the agricultural sector so that farmers are able to access world-class research, methods, and equipment.

Most agricultural sectors have a Research & Development Corporation which should be encouraged to collaborate more with universities and the CSIRO on activities aligned to the overall objectives of this Plan.

Policy measures:

Land management

[Discussion note re levy: the target of this levy is not defined. It has been suggested that it apply to domestic and international produce that do not meet environmental standards, to level the playing field for sustainable agriculture. In some sense, it can be thought of as Medicare for our environment.]

Water management

By 2050 climate change is projected to halve the agricultural output of the Murray-Darling Basin region, but with few exceptions^ water variability is a major cause of concern across the Australian continent. Water licenses, allocations, buy-backs, ‘overland flows’, and environmental flows are all areas of policy needing to be addressed. Important considerations include:

• avoiding ‘market solutions’ to water issues
• factoring into policy decision-making the impact on the health and well-being of rural communities in keeping with the definition of ‘sustainable agriculture’;
• maintaining the environmental health and biodiversity of the river ecosystem across the length and breadth of the Murray-Darling Basin;
• providing town drinking water for our rural and regional communities;
• adequate and accurate measurement of water availability and usage.

Forestry management

The biggest risk to forestry practices in Australia comes from:

• rises in temperature, particularly at the extremes;
• changes in total rainfall and seasonal rainfall distribution manifesting as changes in soil water availability;
• changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration; and
• increased frequency or intensity of storms or flooding and weather conditions producing large-scale wildfires.

Policy measures should provide for/encourage:

Some parts of Australia are expected to receive higher-than-average rainfall as a result of climate change. Others are yet to be impacted by the shifts in rainfall patterns.

Water management

Photo by Maja Petric on Unsplash