Parallel Sessions

This thread will focus on information needed to support climate change adaptation both now and in the future, and how that information can be communicated, made available and best used. Sessions will cover: the use of scenarios to inform thinking about the future and decision-making under uncertainty; the provision of climate information; the communication of information for adaptation, including challenges and barriers to communication of information; and, the importance of the communication of climate change risks to facilitate behavioural change. This thread will also reflect on the developing field of climate change adaptation, ranging from the conduct of scientific assessments to community-based adaptation and the study of institutions and governance.

This thread explores themes around our natural environment and primary industries.
A session on Water explores innovations for climate change adaptation in water sector. There is significant focus on managing the impacts of seasonality of surface flows, extreme events (including higher peak flows, longer and perhaps deeper droughts), seawater intrusion into coastal aquifers, changes in overall amounts of precipitation, and changes in demand that are related to increased temperatures.

Two sessions on Ecosystems will address questions around:

• - What constitutes a dangerous level of climate change for species and ecosystems and how should ecosystem vulnerability be communicated to policy makers and the broader public?
• - Can human action decrease the vulnerability of ecosystems (including costs, benefits, barriers and limits)?
• - Is enhancing resilience of ecosystems the most appropriate approach?

Two sessions on ‘Adapting agriculture to climate change: implications for food producers and food security’ look at the wide range of adaptations that are implemented to offset risks and use opportunities arising from climate change. Climate is a major driver of agriculture and requires adaptation responses from farm-level adjustments to maintain production and sustainability to large-scale policy changes related to the nature of farming in Australia and food security challenges.

Ultimately much adaptation will occur locally, albeit in the context of national and international policy and action. In times of increasingly rapid change, understanding how people will act locally and what knowledge will support them in this action becomes increasingly vital. This thread explores a variety of national and sub-national case studies of adaptation, as well as specifically how Indigenous people are starting to respond to the challenge in Australia, and how local knowledge around the world is mobilised in support of adaptation. We need to move ‘beyond lists’ in terms of understanding how to generalise from many excellent individual studies on these matters.

Adaptation at local or regional scales or across sectors needs to be underpinned by well thought through concepts and frameworks to ensure appropriate and effective responses. For example, better understanding the costs and benefits of adaptation, developing opportunities to better integrate adaptation and mitigation responses or bringing together research, policy and industry groups will allow scarce resources to be better targeted to key adaptation needs. This thread will examine ways in which we can develop and apply frameworks so that bottom-up adaptation responses are better informed and more effectively implemented.

This thread takes up three themes: first, that some areas are more vulnerable to climate change; second, that climate change has the greatest impacts through changing occurrence of extreme events and third, that adaptation takes place principally n response to these extreme events.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment pinpointed those locations most at risk from climate change: the Arctic, Africa, Asian megadeltas, and small islands. In this thread, we look at responses for a sub-set of these: adaptation in the Tropics (1 session), along coasts, in deltas and on small islands (2 sessions). These regions are at the forefront of attempts to adapt to climate change, and many of the experiences in these locations today will inform adaptation planning in future.

The two sessions on Climate extremes and disaster management explore the interface between the disaster management and climate change adaptation community, for floods, droughts and wind storm. Amongst the themes covered, we will look at trade-offs and synergies between short-term responses and long-term adaptation, tool kits and interrelationships between vulnerability, adaptive capacity and action.

Climate change threatens human welfare, through impacts on our living environment, livelihoods and physical and mental health. Adaptation, by responding to these impacts, seeks to maintain or improve quality of life. For these responses to be sustainable, it may not be possible to maintain the present forms and patterns of our existence. Change is an inevitable part of adaptation if we are to live in equilibrium with our changing climate.

This theme explores some of these issues. There are two sessions on ‘Adaptation and the community’, which will test the widely-held view that adaptation should take place locally and be integrated into development activities. The success of community-based adaptation (CBA) will be explored through case studies, and the interactions between CBA and other, more ‘top-down’, approaches to adaptation, will be explored.

This theme will explore adaptation to address climate change impacts on human health, wellbeing and welfare through two sessions, one around ‘Human security, social and equity issues’ and one on ‘Human health’. A session on ‘Engineering solutions for adaptation’ completes this theme.