The Climate Shock Resilience and Adaptation project is funded by the Ministry for Primary Industry’s Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change fund and focuses on the near-term vulnerability of the primary sector to economic shocks due to adverse climate events. Improving our understanding of the plausible range and frequency of adverse climate events, and how they may impact the farming sector, is crucial for proactive adaptation to our changing climate.
Our research hypothesis explores the effects of a suite of climate shock “storylines” on farm systems, the rural economy and stream health and the potential benefits of adaptation options such as on-farm actions and adaptive water resource management frameworks.
“The compounding effects of increasingly frequent and severe weather events on farm financial resilience in a changing climate will, over time, cause a significant adverse impact upon primary sector productivity and thus the rural economy. The risk of these impacts can be reduced by identifying vulnerability and resilience factors and providing adaptation guidance for farming systems and their financial management.”
Project components to date include:
- Characterising “adverse” climate events for the rural and farming community via a farmer-led workshop.
- Creating storylines of plausible climate sequences under current climate conditions and developing statistical tools to provide insights into the likelihood storylines which exceed potential impact and adaptation thresholds.
- Adapting the BASGRA pasture growth model to simulate pasture production under the suite of climate storylines.
- Developing a Farm Economic Health model and a Stream Health Model.
We’ve been very grateful for the diverse expertise our project team has brought to this challenging project including Paul Reese at Matai Consulting on farm systems and farm adaptation options , Greg Bodeker and his team at Bodeker Scientific on climate science, Caroline Saunders at AERU on rural economics, Duncan Gray and Adrian Meredith at Environment Canterbury and many others.
The poster below summarises some of the project outputs so far. We look forward to updating you further as our research progresses.
SLMMAC_Poster_protrait