One of the Australia’s top climate scientists says the latest report by the United Nations leading climate scientists should be a wake-up call to rural Australians.
He added that it should force many farmers to change their attitude on climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released its fifth assessment, a lengthy and detailed report by 209 lead authors from 39 countries.
ABC News reports Professor David Griggs was closely involved in the report and warns that rural Australians and farmers in particular should be sitting up and taking notice.
Professor Griggs is director of the Monash Sustainability Institute and CEO of ClimateWorks.
He told ABC News while the IPCC report did not provide a detailed assessment of the impact of climate change on rural Australia, it did provide more certainty around the scientific basis of climate change.
Some of the likely impacts on farming that are well documented by scientists include a decline in irrigated agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, more intense tropical cyclones, more extreme bushfire days and less wheat production.
He also said there was the risk that Australia would become a net wheat importer, see a decline in wine grape production, and have more droughts and floods.
Professor Griggs said Australia was the nation most vulnerable to climate change impacts on agriculture because small changes in temperature in Australia can produce big falls in productivity.
He said farmers had a well-worn attitude of believing they could survive climate variability and they would get by but there was a risk of this leading to complacency.
“I don’t think they’re in denial about climate change, I think they’re more in denial about the fact that human being are causing it,” he said.
“They’ve almost been deceived into their views about climate change.”
He said there was a real risk that efforts to help agriculture adapt to climate change were not going to be enough to prevent many farms from going out of business.
“Farmers are going to be clearly impacted by climate change.
“So why aren’t the rural areas saying to the politicians, ‘look it’s you city dwellers who are causing all this, we’re the ones feeling all the impact, get the hell on and do something about it.”
Professor Griggs provided scientific advice during the Kyoto Protocol negotiations.
He was head of the IPCC science working group secretariat that gathered and assessed the research of the world’s top climate scientists.
The IPCC would later share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former United States vice-president and climate activist Al Gore.
Professor Griggs said the next ten years were critical if the world was to avoid catastrophic climate change.
