Adapting to change: More realistic quantification of impacts and better informed adaptation alternatives

Rodriguez, D., deVoil, P., Power, B. and Cox, H. (2011). Adapting to change: More realistic quantification of impacts and better informed adaptation alternatives. In: , Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Conservation Agriculture. 5th World Congress on Conservation Agriculture and Farming Systems Design, Brisbane, Australia, (1-5). 26-29 September 2011.

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Author Rodriguez, D.
deVoil, P.
Power, B.
Cox, H.
Title of paper Adapting to change: More realistic quantification of impacts and better informed adaptation alternatives
Conference Paper Type Fully Published Paper
Conference name 5th World Congress on Conservation Agriculture and Farming Systems Design
Conference location Brisbane, Australia
Conference dates 26-29 September 2011
Proceedings title Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Conservation Agriculture
Place published Canberra, ACT, Australia
Publisher Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research
Publication date 2011
Start page 1
End page 5
Total pages 5
Collection year 2012
Language eng
Abstract/Summary Existing analyses on climate change impacts (Challinor et al., 2009), adaptation options (Howden et al., 2007), and policy recommendations (Garnaut, 2008) are mostly based on empirical and/or simulation work pursued at the individual crop level, where the key metric is changes in individual crop yields. This contrasts with the fact that farm managers and policy makers support their decisions with information on farm business profits, risks, and cost benefit analyses between alternative options or scenarios. This mismatch of scales was reported in Rodriguez et al. (2011), where they showed that at the farm level, changes in the yields of individual crops can be rather irrelevant to changes in farm profit risk trade-offs in a changed climate. They concluded that “impact assessments and the identification of opportunities for adaptations to climate change should be conducted at scales most relevant to the decision maker; this is paramount in order to adequately account for the large number of interacting factors”; and proposed that “in the case of adapting cropping systems to climate change the farm level should be the spatial scale of choice”. This is because farmers manage complicated farms rather than just crops, where changes in one enterprise at any point in time can limit options spatially across the farm (e.g. due to land, labour or machinery constraints); and temporally across seasons (e.g. due to follow on implications on soil water and nutrients availability, or the need for breaks for pests or diseases between successive crops). Thus, when the analysis is removed from the farm business context, the disconnect between the more technical issues, e.g. choosing a cultivar or a particular rate of fertilisation, and the final decision made on the farm, conspires against understanding why an individual piece of technology is not adopted, or why an apparently “sub-optimal” decision is finally made. In this work we used a whole farm dynamic simulation model (APSFarm, Rodriguez et al., 2011; Power et al., 2011) to capture and quantify as many possible factors acting at the farm level, to more realistically evaluate options and opportunities for adaptation to climate change across four contrasting real farm case studies across Queensland, Australia.
Q-Index Code E1
Q-Index Status Confirmed Code
Institutional Status UQ

Document type: Conference Paper
Sub-type: Fully Published Paper
Collections: Official 2012 Collection
Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation
 
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Created: Fri, 10 Feb 2012, 20:43:36 EST by Daniel Rodriguez on behalf of Qld Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation