Embedding Climate Change Adaptation in Agriculture in North East Victoria
Anna Roberts and Geoff Park have led a major project with the North East Catchment Management Authority (CMA) in partnership with Spatial Vision, Bridge Logic and Meridian Agriculture. The work was funded by the Australian Government through the National Landcare Program and forms the basis of a multi-year project to help agricultural industries, local government and communities adapt to climate change. Our work was to develop a publicly available spatial tool which incorporated the latest climate change projections and farming systems modelling to estimate potential impacts in 2030 and 2050 compared with historic conditions. The spatial tools developed provide several important advances over current and previous efforts including that 1) That climate data can be readily assessed and interpreted by the public; 2) Climate thresholds of interest have been tailored to meet the interests of different user groups; 3) Agricultural impacts due to changes in climate have been estimated based on production modelling and can be looked at across the region; 4) Being able to view water balance impacts spatially and in a way that the public can assess is a major advance, and particularly important given the importance of the North East CMA region to the Murray-Darling Basin. The spatial tools have recently won an Environment & Sustainability category in the the annual Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards (APSEA) Victoria https://spatialvision.com.au/news-spatial-vision-wins-at-apsea-vic/ and can be accessed through the North East CMA website https://www.necma.vic.gov.au/Solutions/Climate-Change
Posted 2 September 2019 in News
