Managing natural resources in a variable and changing climate

This fact sheet briefly describes a research project investigating the relationship between climate variability and natural resource management (NRM) practices and outcomes in agricultural regions in the Condamine region Qld, northern Victoria, and the Wallatin catchment WA. The project aims to analyse how climate has been changing in the research regions, to assess how climate change has influenced cropping enterprises, including adaptive changes to land management, to identify key management adaptations that will enable farmers to manage both climate variability and climate change, to identify how climate information could be used to enhance decision making about priority NRM issues, to scope the use of climate variability and climate trends in setting targets for natural resource condition and management actions, to identify key climate change adaptation strategies for catchment-scale NRM issues and to compare the relative effectiveness of farm- and catchment-scales for identifying synergies with or barriers to better NRM strategies. Climate analyses indicate there is no general climate trend, hence site-by-site analysis is needed. Initial analyses of the utility of seasonal climate forecasts for NRM indicate that seasonal climate forecasting does not fundamentally alter the nature of NRM: production tradeoffs.