 So just today I'm giving a presentation, it draws on a huge amount of work and not just mine and particularly that of Steve Krimp and Udai who helped put this presentation together. And I'll be focusing not so much on the climate variability that Joel just talked about, but sort of more adapting to the changing climate so that's variability on a slightly longer scale than the seasonal type of scale. So when we sort of look back at why we sort of do studies which investigate adaptation to that sort of climate change or changing climate, back in 2007 I put out a paper in PNAS which is a pretty prestigious journal and I basically said that there's two main reasons why we actually want to do adaptation studies. Now the first one is so that it actually informs the mitigation agenda, the sorts of things that were discussed in Paris. And the basic rationale here is that if you actually have systems which you can adapt to extremely well, the impact of climate change is effectively zero. So the rationale for engaging strongly in mitigation is reduced. But if in fact you have adaptation that only can partially offset negative impacts of climate change, then the rationale for mitigation is enhanced. And what we're actually increasingly seeing in work done across the world that that's the case is that the climate is changing, that we do have adaptation options, but these aren't able to fully offset those negative impacts and the other side of the coin, the positives, aren't as big as those negatives that you otherwise occur. Now when you actually do these sorts of studies, typically they're focused on long time scales, 2050, 2100, and they're very much a science activity. So they don't have a lot of stakeholder engagement in them. So they're done largely as a science activity to inform policy or hopefully inform policy. The other way we actually approach adaptation is quite different. It's actually to try to inform investments and management and policy decisions that are being made now, not in the mitigation domain, but in all the other domains associated with sustainable development. So when we do that, typically it's for a period somewhere like between one year and 20 years ahead and it's not a science activity, it's fundamentally done in partnership with those people who are interested in that information for their decisions in better risk management, the sorts of things that Joel talked about on that seasonal scale. So when people do this, it's actually them who usually integrate that information. They take that sort of adaptation information, worked up with the science agencies and then implement it in their decision making process. So it's a very different type of activity. And what we saw in Paris with essentially commitments globally to that mitigation agenda, the focus should now move to that second sort of area of work, which is actually about how adaptation can better inform management and policy and investments. And critical part of that is how can we actually engage with decision makers to actually give them the evidence base that changing what they do now is actually desirable, whether it's feasible and whether it's manageable. So those are the things that I'm going to be covering briefly in this presentation. And the basic theory or concept sitting behind my presentation is that if we actually don't respond to those changes that are already happening, then we will either underperform or we will incur increasing risk. If you're a business, both of those are problematic. You don't want to underperform, nor do you actually incur unnecessary risk. So just a few slides on what's happening in terms of climate. So much of this many people will know, but I think it's important just to go and look at that evidence base as to why people may want to change their activities right now. So this is looking at temperature across southern Australia, drawn straight from the BOM website last night or night before. And that shows temperature, the black line as the 10-year moving average. And as you can see, that's going up and up and up. There is no slowdown in temperature increase in Australia. There is no slowdown in temperature increase across the world. Last year was the hottest year on record by a long way. So and if you look at the top of those curves, the last couple of years, not last year, but the years before that in southern Australia were record temperatures. And they were way, way above those temperatures that agriculture practices had actually developed in the last several decades. So if you look back the 1950s, there's a really big difference in that record. Such a difference that the minimum temperatures, annual temperatures we're experiencing now, are around about the same temperature as the hottest years experienced by people who are farming in the 1950s or 60s. So we're already going outside that envelope of previous temperature experience. And not unexpectedly, this is starting to impact on agriculture. So this is work by Bangu Zhang and colleagues looking at the first day of the year where you actually get hot weather, like that's temperatures greater than 35 Celsius, across the cropping zones in Australia, looking at the previous century versus those years in the current century up to 2009. And what we're seeing is in the north, that first hot day, which can seriously impact on yield potential, is coming three weeks earlier. In the southern part of Australia, southeast part of Australia, it's one week earlier and in the west little change. But that itself is actually a really significant potential impact on agriculture which needs to be included in things like varietal selection and planting dates. But even though the temperature on average has gone up across southern Australia, paradoxically somewhat, the frost risk is actually increasing. This is work by Steve Krimpin colleagues. And so across significant parts of southern Australia, particularly the southeast, frosts are coming earlier and they're also coming later. So the frost window has increased, the number of frosts has increased and the frost risk for agriculture has particularly increased as a combination, both of those late frosts, which are the killer frosts, which really impact on economic values, things like grapevines really get nailed by those. But also because it is on average warmer, the internal clock of those plants is actually accelerating. So crops ripen earlier, bringing them into that frost risk period and grapevines and similar things bud burst earlier, bringing them into that frost risk period. So you've got a double whammy of increased frost risk associated with the climatology and increased frost risk associated with the biology and combined actually make quite a problematic situation for a lot of people. Now it's not just temperature. These are graphs that actually came out just last week from the Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre, now David Stevens and colleagues, showing how the seasonality of rainfall, looking back some decades compared with now, so that's historical versus the last few years, what everything's moved south basically, which is sort of not unexpected given climate change, effectively in a sense the subtropics are moving into the temperate zone, etc. So what was fundamentally a uniform rainfall environment now actually may become somewhat dominated. What used to be a winter dominate is actually now more uniform. So those zones are moving south in Australia. They have significant impacts in terms of agriculture and it's not just the seasonality, but it's also rainfall amounts. So if we look in Southeast Australia, we sort of lost about 15% of our rainfall in the last 10 years or so. If you go across to the west, it's closer to 25% of rainfall in the growing season. So not only has those seasonality of rainfall changed, but the amounts of rainfall have also changed. Significant impacts already happening right now. So there's a whole stack of responses that are in a sense in the bag that can be used to manage these sorts of changes and we've gone out and worked with farmers and farmer groups to explore how they'd respond if things get hotter or if the extremes are greater or if the rainfall is reduced. There's a whole raft of different responses that can be brought in to bear for each scenario. So I won't go into the detail here, but it's important to actually recognise that there's a lot that can be done in terms of manipulating existing systems. So it's what we call incremental change for existing systems that we can already start to implement. And those are really critical to actually do as the first step is to actually make sure we are at best practice in terms of climate risk management. But just to demonstrate one point in terms of why it's so critical, this is again looking at that frost issue, which I think is pretty interesting. So the graph on the right-hand side is essentially a frost risk sort of diagram. On the bottom it is the screen minimum temperature going from minus 2, which is over on the left-hand side. You can't really see that thing. But over here it's minus 2, which is a really hard frost, and 2 degrees, which is a light frost in between. And up here is the date of the year of the last frost. So if you look in this case at Wagga, the last frost is experienced around about the third week of August. That's historically in the 1950s. And that was around a light frost. And you got the last sort of moderate frost, one degree screen temperature sort of in the middle of the year. Now if we actually step through decade by decade that change, so in the 1960s that had changed. So the frosts are a bit more severe. In the 70s it was not that much different. 80s again a little bit later and it's more severe. The 90s getting a bit later again and the last decade. So not only as the degree of frost, we've got a lot more hard frosts, but the lateness of the frost has changed. So instead of being the third week of August, the last frost is now coming around about the first week of October. And that has huge implications in terms of frost risk in these places. And so we actually did some studies in Wagga and I'd done a study in Emerald in North Queensland where the frost risk is reducing rather than increasing. I did that about 12 years ago. But if we, and I'm just comparing those two studies. So the strategy that we took is what happens if you ignore frost risk when you're planting reed? What happens if you take a 100 year view of frost risk which is sort of in a sense what's previously been seen as industry best practice? Or what happens if you take a 10 year rolling window of that frost risk? So you look only at the last 10 years as an estimate of your risk factor. And so gross margins in Wagga as your baseline which is just ignoring frost risk of about 119 per hectare. If you take a 100 year view of frost risk you increase by about $8 which is still useful money in the bag. But if you take an adaptive, a decade by decade view you actually are significantly better off than if you take that 100 year sort of view. And in Emerald, the numbers are different cause different situation, different time and so different prices. But $34 is your baseline, if you ignore it you're worse off if you take a 100 year view because you're particularly underperforming in the early part of the record that you're actually way better off if you take an adaptive view. So the message here is that by sensible changes in practice by taking an adaptive view of climate change so actually moving with that change you can actually make significant money compared with the alternative. So this is an important part of what we call the climate adaptation journey. So when we go out and work with farmers and farmer groups first up the focus of those farmer groups is really agronomic changes. So changes in planting date changes and cultivation practices and things like that. But as we go through that same farmer group over several years and engage with them continuously about what makes sense to do in terms of climate change as their understanding of the issue increases as they start to think about climate change in terms of their whole business the focus turns almost entirely onto strategic business management. So it's no longer about the agronomy it's actually thinking about strategic business management. So this is really important. So if you're actually starting to think about policy and industry programs it really is about upping that strategic business management capability that ability to make really good sensible long-term decisions about business risk about balancing work life and family balancing sort of different enterprises and the risk involved in those different enterprises. So for example, DAF some years ago ran that pilot the drought pilot in West Australia which focused on strategic business management and it was exactly the right thing to do. And if we're actually thinking about that it's really important to think comprehensively about adaptation. So the first cab off the rank in a sense is actually incremental change to existing systems. So if you farm wheat or you farm rice you think about doing that better. But if we do that there is actually a risk of locking ourselves in to practices which actually are not the best option for you as a business manager or in a regional development sense. So actually if you do that you can actually not only incur additional risk which I've mentioned before but you might miss out on opportunities from changing your practices by thinking more broadly. So we need to think about systemic change which is bringing new elements into your enterprise or transformational change which is really significant changes to your enterprise, changes in location, significant changes in what you do. And the reason why I think this is important is illustrated by this graph which comes from the work of Zvi Hockman and colleagues down in the Wimmer with the Birchup cropping group and others. And this graph shows what we call the yield gap. So it's observed yields in farmer's paddocks versus what could have been achieved in that farm paddock in terms of crop yield. And so when that yield gap is high it's bad because there's significant underperformance. As it gets lower there's actually you're actually approaching the potential yield in that particular paddock for that particular year. So if we look over time that yield gap back a few decades was sitting around on average across these farms was about three tonnes per hectare. But over time as our ground line practices get better and better that yield gap is starting to close. So it's now a trend is round about to one tonne a hectare. So clearly with this trend and with that sort of enterprise there's only so much you can do. Now as this trend goes down to zero you've got no more room to move if you're going to stick doing what you've done in the past. So at that point you need to think or right now you probably need to think about more than incremental change you need to think about systemic or transformational change because that's the way you're actually going to improve and continue to increase your productivity. And farmers are already doing this. So this is a survey by Imogen Schwartz and colleagues going back a couple of years. Two periods they did one survey in the middle of the millennium drought and then another survey in the wet years that followed. And they looked at farmers considering change or doing changes of different degrees in their practices. So at the top it's what you'd think of is that incremental change you know changing your business, changing your management and more than around about half of the farmers were thinking about doing that as a function of climate change. When you're looking at changing enterprise mix and starting new enterprises that's the more systemic sort of changes and you see still around about one in three farmers is thinking about doing that. And for the new enterprise and buying land moving your activities which is the more transformational change we're actually seeing around about 10% of farmers thinking about that. So these things, these sort of systemic and transformational changes aren't left field they're not sort of way out of the mainstream. These are things that people are already thinking about or already doing in various cases. So that sort of broader consideration of the adaptation options is really important and as we can see it's already starting to happen. Now just a couple of more slides just in this case on social networks. So this is work done by Ann Marie Dowd and colleagues and just emphasizing that the needs of different and the modes of operation of different adaptation levels are very, very different. So what this shows on the left is the social networks of incremental adapters versus the social networks of transformational adapters. So these are in the farming community. And what they found was that those incremental adapters so people who are just making small changes their existing systems had very intense social networks and often very localized social networks so they were very strong in the location where they lived. Whereas those transformational adapters had very weak social networks or relatively weak ones and often at a distance so that the people they were connected with were in Queensland or in West Australia or in Chile or somewhere else. But the information networks for these people were exactly the opposite. So those incremental adapters were largely happy with what they knew and what they were doing. Whereas those transformational adapters who were looking at making really complex and risky decisions were sponges for information and they were getting it everywhere. So if you're thinking about policy or if you're thinking about knowledge needs then the needs for these different groups are fundamentally different. So how you actually encourage those incremental adapters and facilitate that best practice is very different from how you actually would support transformational adaptation which I think is probably going to become more and more needed over the next decades. And the last slide here is just to remember to think beyond the farm gate when you're thinking about adaptation. So work by Lily Limca Matcha and colleagues just as looking at how you can adapt value chain systems to climate change, climate disruptions. So thinking about doing work with these big companies some of the very biggest corporations around about what their current climate impacts are how these are likely to change or already changing and how they can better manage that. And so this sort of work on value chains I think is going to become increasingly important because we can't treat what happens on farm in isolation from what happens in these value chains. And importantly, as we go down this pathway more and more, climate issues will be integrated with all the other business issues that these companies deal with. They can't treat climate in isolation. It has to be integrated to come to sensible decisions. So just in summary, a few points. Firstly, what I've tried to put up here is a case that the climate is already changing and it's already impacting on agricultural systems. There are a whole raft of things that we can do to manage those changes. They're incremental changes to existing systems. We know pretty much how to do those. We're not always doing them well as well as we could. There's a case to be made, I think, for thinking much more broadly about systemic and transformational change but this has new knowledge needs, new information needs, new institutional needs which we're not responding to as yet. And lastly, we actually need to think broadly about what are the social networks that support change? What are those which hold back change? So that dense social network that I showed you up before is very normative. It actually restrains, it restricts people from thinking out of the box and doing something new, doing something adventurous and possibly doing something better. And lastly, we actually need to think, as I said before, about value chains because by integrating what happens on farms with value chains is where a lot of the best information is going to have a lot of the value from adapting to climate change is going to occur. Thank you.