The Australian Farmer

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the australian farmer

In addition to adapting to climate change (e.g., higher temperatures), there is an increasing need to be resilient to higher frequency and greater magnitude shocks (e.g., severe droughts, greater frequency and magnitude floods). Effective strat- egies to promote resilience need responses to four key questions. These are, resilience Of What? (farm scale, catchment, cities, etc.)?, To What? (e.g. droughts and floods), For Whom? (farmers, down- stream communities, etc.), and Through What? (farmer initiatives, basin-scale management, etc.). Need for Collective Action and Sustainability Collective responses to droughts in Australia have, to date, primarily focused on inter-temporal water transfers by expanding water storages (on farm and in large publicly constructed dams). In Australia’s largest and coastal cities, a supply re- sponse to the Millennium Drought that ended in 2010, was to build desalination plants as a back-up water supply. The high costs of transporting water and the costs of constructing and supplying alternative water sources, such as from desalination and air- to-water technologies, are economically unviable for most of Australian agriculture. For many Aus- tralian farmers there is no alternative to but to bet- ter manage, at both a farm and basin scale, how

The AED findings in Nature are complemented by results from satellite data published in the jour- nal Science (Seo et al. 2025). The Science authors found that over the period 2002 to 2022 terrestrial water storage has declined steeply. Consequently, on average, there has been a 25 mm global decline in soil moisture over the past two decades. In the absence of effective farmer responses, a combination of heat and water stresses will reduce crop yields and increase food insecurity (Kompas et al. 2024). Climate change may also induce simul- taneous global crop failures due to coincident and adverse changes in key global climate oscillations (e.g. El Nino). Adaptation and Resilience Australian farmers are responding to heat and water stresses in multiple ways. At a farm scale, responses to heat and water stress include, but are not limited to; changes to when crops are planted and harvested, what crops and cultivars are grown, increased water use efficiency, soil moisture mon- itoring, and even relocation. Effective adaptation also requires collective action to ensure ssustain- able levels of water diversions, well-regulated and compliant water markets, effective monitoring of water diversions, and transparent and independ- ent water audits.