think climate. think change.
Department of Climate Change, 2008
Documents are available for downloading as PDF files. (PDF help)
If you are unable to access these documents, please contact us to organise a suitable alternative format.
The evidence of warming of the Earth’s climate system is unequivocal. It is evident from increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, melting of snow and ice, and rising sea levels.
Adaptation to climate change is no longer a question of “if” but rather of “how”, “where” and “how fast”.
For the regions of Australia in which most people live and most food and fibre is produced — i.e. the eastern seaboard and southern and south-western Australia — the greenhouse effect is leading generally to a hotter, drier climate, marked by more extreme weather events, but less rainfall and even less runoff overall. Climate change is real and long lasting and will have major implications for the way that natural resources are managed at the regional level. From a water perspective alone, the implications of climate change are profound. Changes in water availability will in turn have, for example, major implications for vegetation management.
An extremely variable climate has always been a fundamental driver of ecological processes and land use systems in Australia, shaping adaptations among our unique biota and distinctive farming systems. Australia’s inherent climate variability is now being exacerbated by global warming, and underlying climatic parameters are moving.
Climate is a driver for almost every natural resource management issue being tackled by regional NRM bodies*, and climate change will have far-reaching impacts on many ecological, hydrological and resource-degrading processes. Climate change is not just another natural resource management (NRM) issue.
The convergence of climate, water and energy in a carbon-constrained world will likely change the ground rules for managing natural resources in Australia. They will reach deeply into every aspect of our lives and those of our children and their descendants.
We cannot be serious about regional NRM if we put climate change in the too hard basket.
Australia’s 56 regional NRM bodies are at the front line of tackling sustainability challenges on the ground.
Regional NRM bodies operate at a catchment or landscape scale, across industries, property boundaries and land tenures. They bring diverse stakeholders together to deliver integrated approaches to NRM problems and play an important bridging role between governments and regional communities. They are ideally placed to meld top down strategy and resources with bottom up energy and engagement to deliver effective and lasting responses at a regional scale.
Climate change responses need to be hard-wired into the core business of every regional NRM body in Australia—not as a separate issue but as a core feature of the operating environment.
Without in any way demeaning the size of the challenge, regional NRM bodies should not be intimidated by climate change adaptation. For many natural resource assets, existing threats such as increasing resource use intensity, poor farming or pastoral practices, invasive species and fire, will remain the main pressures. Those pressures may be exacerbated and compounded by climate change, but they won’t be replaced by it. Regional NRM Plans remain appropriate for adapting to and managing climate change impacts, because they provide a framework for integrating a range of responses to a range of pressures across a range of assets, and for managing risk.
Well-managed farms in Australia have always handled climate risk well. Farming profitably in Australia demands sophisticated risk management, and climate change will force us to become even more skilled. Regional NRM bodies must do likewise at a regional scale.
Business as usual NRM planning will not suffice as an adequate climate change response. In most cases, climate change ups the ante and creates a more urgent imperative to find lasting solutions, but in the short to medium term, it does not fundamentally change the game. Many climate change responses are “no regrets” measures with complementary benefits for issues such as biodiversity, soil health or water quantity and quality. The overlap between best practice regional NRM and constructive climate change adaptation measures is significant. This provides lots of scope for regional NRM bodies to make a very useful contribution in the overall response to climate change.
In the main, on-ground investment undertaken by regional NRM bodies need not look radically different under climate change scenarios. Best practice regional NRM can alleviate existing pressures through actions such as improving land use planning and agricultural practices; restoring landscape connectivity; managing invasive species; targeting provision of environmental water; and improving water quality.
One of the biggest levers that regional NRM bodies can use is their influence over native vegetation management and revegetation activities. Preventing poorly planned clearing and overgrazing of native vegetation and encouraging well planned revegetation works to restore vegetation cover in over-cleared landscapes is a key focus of many Regional NRM Plans. Most Regional NRM Plans already emphasise landscape connectivity, and look to extend defined key habitat areas with buffer zones and corridors to reduce fragmentation and to offer habitat continuity for less mobile species. This strategy will become increasingly important in the face of climate change.
Moreover, climate change underlines the importance of implementing measures to encourage biodiversity conservation outside the formal reserves system of National Parks and other wildlife reserves. Conservation of biodiversity on private and leasehold lands has always been important, but in a changing climate it becomes even more so.
The spatial location and configuration of revegetation projects are among the most critical technical issues in thinking about climate change implications for many Regional NRM Plans. Climate change makes it even more important to get it right: to get the right sorts of vegetation, in the right parts of the landscape, in the right configuration, with the right establishment techniques and the right on-going management regime.
The biggest climate change impact for most regional NRM bodies will be long term reductions in water yield. In many catchments, reduction in water yield will be reflected in increasing stream salt concentrations. Those two factors in turn have significant biodiversity implications across whole landscapes, and obvious impacts on water quality and infrastructure. Climate change will not reduce those impacts, and in some cases will make them worse.
Large scale revegetation is a valuable tool for tackling salinity, especially in catchments with local groundwater flow systems. It can be very valuable to increase or augment wildlife habitat, and it is an important transition tool in offsetting greenhouse gas emissions. But in the context of warming, drying catchments with declining water yields, large scale revegetation has to be planned and sited very carefully if it is not to exacerbate reductions in water yield with consequent knock-on environmental impacts.
Invasive species may be among the more important and least predictable impacts of climate change in Australia. A particular challenge in this area is the potential for “sleeper” weeds and ferals to begin to expand their range suddenly and dramatically in response to even moderate shifts in climate.
Fire is a classic example of how climate change affects other NRM issues and the interactions between them. From an NRM perspective, the biodiversity, water yield and water quality advantages from preventing huge fires and keeping fires as small as possible are considerable.
Irrespective of mitigation actions taken now, we need to start now to adapt to climate change for the foreseeable future. Teasing out what this means for regional NRM bodies is the focus of this primer, which points to pathways and resources.
The good news is that there are important synergies between being well positioned for climate change adaptation and best practice regional NRM. Successful regional NRM bodies will incorporate climate change adaptation into their core business at all levels, bringing their communities with them.
That will be a fine and important contribution to tackling the most important challenge of this century.
The term “regional NRM bodies” is used throughout this document to refer to the 56 regional bodies recognised by the Australian Government. They are called Catchment Management Authorities in Victoria and New South Wales, Regional NRM Boards in South Australia and the Northern Territory, Regional NRM Committees in Tasmania and Regional NRM Groups in Queensland and Western Australia.
