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Climate change scenarios to facilitate stakeholder engagement in agricultural adaptation

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change volume 17, pages 957–973 (2012)Cite this article

Abstract

To prepare agricultural systems for climate change, scientists need to be able to effectively engage with land managers and policy makers to explore potential solutions. An ongoing challenge in engagement is to distil the complexity of climate-change-management-change interactions in agro-ecological systems to identify responses that are most important for adaptation planning. This paper presents an approach for selecting climate change scenarios to provide a focal point for engaging with stakeholders to evaluate adaptation options and communicate assessment outcomes. We illustrate how scenarios selected with the approach can be used by evaluating climate change impacts and an adaptation option for livestock industries in the north-east Australian rangelands. Climate change impacts on forage production, animal liveweight gain and soil loss are found to track projected climate changes in four pasture communities; increasing by up to 50% and declining by up to 110% in response to doubled atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2), 4°C warming, and +20% to −40% changes in mean annual rainfall. The effectiveness of reducing grazing pressure as an adaptation option shows a similar response; resulting in higher forage production (up to 40%), animal liveweight gains (up to 59%) and gross margins (up to 40%), and reduced soil erosion (down by 91%) per hectare relative to the baseline management. The results show that a few key scenarios may be selected to represent the range of global climate model (GCM) projections for use in assessing and communicating impacts and adaptation; simplifying the assessments and allowing limits to the effectiveness of adaptation options to be explored. The approach provides a framework for capturing and communicating trends in climate change impacts and the utility of options, which are required for successful engagement of stakeholders in finding viable adaption responses.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Greg McKeon, Giselle Wish, Neil MacLeod, Joe Scanlan and Cam McDonald for helpful discussions on applying the GRASP and Enterprise models to adaptation assessments. We thank Alison Laing, April Reside and the anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. The work was partly funded by the Australian Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery’s Climate Change Research Program.

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  1. CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, PMB PO Aitkenvale, Townsville, QLD, 4814, Australia

    N. P. Webb & C. J. Stokes

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  1. N. P. Webb
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  2. C. J. Stokes
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Correspondence to N. P. Webb.

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Webb, N.P., Stokes, C.J. Climate change scenarios to facilitate stakeholder engagement in agricultural adaptation. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 17, 957–973 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-011-9355-1

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Keywords

  • Adaptation
  • Agriculture
  • Assessment
  • Climate scenario
  • Impacts
  • Uncertainty

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