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[Music playing]
(Dr. Mark Howden) I’m Doctor Mark Howden
from CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship.
I lead a cross-organisational activity bringing together
the expertise of the organisation in relation to
managing climate variability in climate change in
relation to agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining.
The IPCC is the intergovernmental panel on climate change.
It’s a body which has been brought together
to inform the United Nations on climate change issues,
it’s supported by 196 governments,
and it brings together the best science and the best scientists
from around the world to inform the UN,
the United Nations, on climate change issues.
This is the fifth in a series of reports the working group do,
which deals with the impacts and adaptation,
brings together our understanding of how climate change
has already impacted on systems around the world.
I think the key finding is that there is increased evidence
that climate change presents a serious risk to Australia and the world.
So climate adaptation
is simply changing what we do to get what we want,
so it’s the idea of adjusting our activities, and our policies,
and our institutions, to suit the environment of the day.
So it’s not restricted to climate change,
it’s something that humans always do in response to a range of different
pressures and stresses, or opportunities.
There’s a whole series of practical
adaptation options that we can start to undertake,
and this in response to the changes that we’re already seeing,
as well as those which may happen in the future.
[Music playing]
CSIRO has been doing many different strands of work
that feeds into the IPCC report,
and some of it’s in relation to agriculture and food security,
and looking at the successful adaptations to future change,
and to existing change.
And some of it’s in water resources where we’ve been
looking at how climate change may affect water flows,
and how those could be best allocated,
and institutional arrangements to manage those allocations.
We’ve been involved in coastal zone planning,
so starting to build in sea level rise into planning activities
so that we can actually look at more effective local government
regulation and local government planning activities.
How climate change may affect cities,
our built infrastructure, and looking at how we can change the materials,
the design of buildings, and also the design of
whole precincts within cities so they can adjust to climate change.
We’ve also been involved in work on the conservation domain,
so looking at how national parks
and conservation goals may need to change in the future,
and what are some of the management activities that support those changes.
[Music playing]
It’s important to adapt sooner rather than later for a couple of reasons.
One of these is so that we don’t incur additional risk
and miss out on opportunities for the changes that we’re seeing already,
and that will happen over the short term.
The second reason is that we don’t do things now
which prevent more effective adaptations in the long term,
so that we don’t lock ourselves in
to pathways which limit our adaptations in the future.
So by taking good decisions now we can actually bring
economic and social environment benefit for the future.
[Music playing]