Resilient farm businesses

Project title - Developing climate resilient cropping and mixed cropping/grazing businesses in Australia

Project Goal
Increase the understanding of on what is changing and what are the likely consequences to mixed cropping businesses with persistent climate variability.

Aim of the project
Work with farmers and agronomists towards reducing risks by identifying and developing management tools and processes.

Approach
understand existing farming systems and identify possible changes,
identify issues, decisions and information needs
assess (climate) impacts and trends, including their uncertainty,
evaluate the impacts,
assess the adaptation options, and their broader consequences,
support farmers by providing tools and process to help evaluate implementation options.

Background
The rate of on going climate change, its attributed impacts, and the likely event that insufficient mitigation action will lead to more than 2°C of global warming, are making the need for planned adaptation ‘enormous'.

Whilst the case for planned adaptation is overwhelming, identifying, evaluating and effectively initiating planned adaptation actions remain challenging. This is largely a function of the uncertainty surrounding the trajectory of climate change, and the outcomes of ongoing autonomous adaptations. Whilst these uncertainties exist, addressing questions like - adapting to what?, by what extent?, and by when?, will remain challenging research issues.

When uncertainty rules, the concept of resilience might be of help to identify feasible pathways to introduce robustness in a system while maintaining the necessary flexibility to respond to change. Resilience has been defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organise while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. Resilience was also linked to the concepts of vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Both resilience and adaptive capacity, are measures of the capacity of a system to respond and reduce vulnerability when exposed to an external stress.

Here we propose that a way to strengthen the resilience of Queensland farming systems to change is to improve our understanding of the characteristics of resilient farming systems and then propose evaluated (i.e. benefits, costs, trade-offs) adaptation options (i.e. incremental and transformational) that would increase the adaptedness of the systems to overcome change.