The KSL team has been busy with our Climate Shock Resilience and Adaptation project over the last couple of months. This multidisciplinary project is funded by the Ministry for Primary Industry’s Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change programme and explores the near-term vulnerability of the primary sector to climate-based economic shocks. Improving our understanding of the possible range and frequency of adverse weather events and their impact on the farming sector is key for adaptation planning.
The vulnerability of our Canterbury Plans case study farming systems is directly correlated with irrigation reliability. Evaluation of the interaction between climate shock and water take impacts on stream health, climate shock impacts on farm and rural economy health and water resource management policy is required to understand vulnerabilities and explore adaptation strategies, from farm scale to regional scale. To assist with this we’ve been developing a Farm Economic Health (FEH) model and a Stream Health Model (SHM) which evaluate the impact of a suite of 10-year climate shock “storylines”. Both models assign an annual health score based on flow and climate variables for that year. The models will be used in the final stages of the project to evaluate water management policy and farm management adaptation options and to explore adaptation thresholds.
On Monday we held the first of two workshops with a team of freshwater ecologists to parameterise the SHM via expert judgement elicitation under the SHELF framework (https://lnkd.in/gmvRFnr4). We’re very grateful to Duncan Gray, Adrian Meredith, Richard Allibone, and Greg Burrell for your time and contributions! We’re looking forward to the group elicitation workshop next week.
Zeb Etheridge will be talking more about this project and incorporating climate risk in water management decision making at the Hydrosoc conference in Dunedin on Tuesday 6th December at 10.40am. We hope to see you there.
A more detailed summary of the project and a poster presented by Matthew Hanson Dumont at the 2021 Hydrological Society conference can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gNimf-vS