[insert slide 1] I have been asked to speak about managing in a - PDF document

PETER HAYMAN [insert slide 1] I have been asked to speak about managing in a variable and changing climate, and the basic theme is both variability and the change. And I’ve got to try and do that very quickly. [insert slide 2] This is a simple graphic from Roger Jones from CSIRO that many of you have probably seen before, but I think it summarizes the issue, that we have a variable climate. It wiggles up and down, and in a changing or non-stationary climate, we move in that. I guess what we are really trying to argue about is that managing this variability is very important, partly because we would expect with a changing climate more variability, but I think that is a bit of an over-simplification, a bit of a bumper sticker. In some cases, we will get less variability, mainly because the main way to cope in a changing climate is how we manage variability. Variability is going to be what hurts us, there is going be these peaks, and as we try and expand this coping range by adaptation, one of those ways to adapt along with better varieties, along with better farming practices and so on is understanding the variability and the climate science behind that. I guess I would see that there is probably two extremes in views in farmers and other people I speak to. One is that, “Look, we’ve managed this incredible variability. We’re bullet-proof. We can handle anything into the future.” The other view seems to be held by some NRM people and others that the first little bit of change is going to knock farmers out. With my colleagues, we will try to run this perfectly rational middle ground that is somewhere in between those two. So it is going to present new challenges and important challenges but we can overstate the impact of climate change in the short term, so I guess at a very simple level, compared to some other commentators, I think I am more optimistic about 2030 and more pessimistic about 2070; time matters in these projections. [insert slide 3] But just to be clear here that we are acknowledging climate change; this is an important study by William Klein, and if we were to get four degrees warming with business as usual along with ecosystem destruction, along with many, many dispossessed people, we will have significant food shortages. But an important point is that that is four degrees warming and 2080. That is well into the future and really is telling us where we must not go, where we don’t want to go. How we can adapt to four degrees is very difficult. When I was at uni in the ‘80s, I remember one person

PETER HAYMAN did a PhD on how nuclear war would be bad for wheat growth, and I think sometimes studying the notion of what four degrees will do to agriculture is a bit similar. [insert slide 4] This diagram here from the IPPC shows this notion of a coping range, adaptive capacity and vulnerability. Notice this goes from 2000 to 2300. Sometimes, in climate change discussions, these are the world’s – nothing is going to go past 2100. It goes well into the future there. It has this idea of this one to six / one to seven degrees of different sectors having vulnerability and an adaptive capacity and a coping range. And if you look for agriculture there, there is a fairly large – there is a coping range but there is a big adaptive capacity. We can work in this area. This is not pre-defined, but again – let’s stress again that the discussion we are having here is about the next few decades, and that is right back here, okay? And so we are talking about this bit here. There is no question, no doubt, that if we get up into here there is major problems, and the huge amount of information about the tipping points and everything else there. So we are talking about this variability, how we manage that in a non-stationary climate? And there is an interesting argument that so much of our understanding of risk, how we talk about risk, how we discuss risk, how we talk about deciles and everything, assume a stationary climate. We have assumed a stationary climate in how we do that and how we are trained at university and how we have discussions. Maybe that was never the case; we’ve always had a non-stationary climate and climate change is highlighting that. [insert slide 5] So in the Managing Climate Variability Program, there has been a lot of work in Australia on the basis of this, on that variability, and an emphasis on ENSO, [insert slide 6] but also in more recent work and there is information out in the foyer there about the important, as Wenju Cai talks about, the important three headed dog of ENSO, Indian Ocean dipole and the Southern Annular Mode and how they all work in a complex way to effect our climate. You can see that on Water in the Land from the Bureau of Meteorology. Climate change will be delivered to us through climate, through seasonal climate, through weather, and how these interact, and so on. So it is an important part of how we do that and how we prepare for that. [insert slide 7] Background to this is that it has been incredibly dry in Southern Australia. So this is October 1996 to September 2008, so for someone like Ian McClelland, he’s got to go back to October before he remembers decent rainfall. So it has been an incredibly

PETER HAYMAN long dry spell through there. Obviously, there has been a few wet times in between there, but there has been this long term drying there. And that becomes a pertinent and difficult question. [insert slide 8] So in my new adopted home of South Australia, I just wanted to make this point that we really are about a very small group living on the edge of this very, very wet bits at the bottom – well, relatively wet bits with this huge dry desert just to the North. [insert slide 9] Goyder talked about this in the 1860s / 1870s, drew this line which has been remarkably – had a huge amount of foresight, and there is a lot of discussion if that was to shift, if we were to have a drying trend. If you like, Clare is double the rainfall of Orroroo. If you were ever going to say rainfall was going to halve at Clare, one idea would be to get in the car and drive from there to there, and it is an amazingly different sort of country, and especially as you go through these sort of transects and so on. But one other point is that we all live on a boundary, and in the 2006 drought, visiting people down in the bottom end of the Yorke Peninsula and in Kangaroo Island, and there is an old guy in Kangaroo Island. They were the most shocked by that drought of anybody, compared to people up here, who were dealing with droughts all the time. So in one sense, we all have systems that are adapted to the edge there. [insert slide10] As you can see here there are many farms, many grain farms, north of Goyder’s line and on Goyder’s line and north of Goyder’s line. And we are doing a bit of work to try and understand is this due to soils and other situations as well. So there is a large amount of farming that has gone north of that and one area is Minnepa which is on the Eyre Peninsula. [insert slide 11] This is just a quick run through the growing season rainfall at Minnepa, and you can see this run of very poor seasons recently. I guess one point here is that we look at these troughs, these droughts, but one of the really important points is this; it’s just the lack of good years in between the droughts. So there has not been this bounce back, if you like. We tend to bounce back to this sort of median, rather than going above. So I think we talk about the droughts but one of the main issues is the lack of good years. And so a good friend in my short time in South Australia, he went back farming and he picked 2005 to go back farming, and so he’s basically just had this – he’s young, university educated, had a