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Australian agriculture: coping with dangerous climate change

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Abstract

Australian agriculture has operated successfully in one of the world’s most hostile environments for two centuries. However, climate change is posing serious challenges to its ongoing success. Determining what might constitute dangerous climate change for Australian agriculture is not an easy task, as most climate-related risks are associated with changes in the highly uncertain hydrological cycle rather than directly to more predictable changes in temperature. In addition, the adaptive capacity of Australian producers is generally high, as they have had to cope with a highly variable climate in which periodic, severe droughts are the norm. As the underlying global trends in climate interact with the continent’s patterns of natural variability, producers can generally deal with gradual changes in climate but are most concerned about high rates of change in regional and local climates and with abrupt, unexpected shifts in climate patterns. Perhaps the best indicator of dangerous climate change for Australian agriculture is the persistence, or not, of the drying trends in many of the Country’s most productive regions and the strength of the linkage between these trends and global climate change.

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Acknowledgments

We thank two reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Author notes

  1. Greg Laughlin

    Present address: Australian National Data Service, Monash University and Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The ANU Climate Change Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Will Steffen

  2. Climate Change, Land and Forests, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics––Bureau of Rural Sciences, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Australian Government, Canberra, Australia

    John Sims, James Walcott & Greg Laughlin

Authors
  1. Will Steffen
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  2. John Sims
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  4. Greg Laughlin
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Correspondence to Will Steffen.

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Steffen, W., Sims, J., Walcott, J. et al. Australian agriculture: coping with dangerous climate change. Reg Environ Change 11 (Suppl 1), 205–214 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-010-0178-5

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