Dr Greg McKeon

Climate change and natural resource management in Australia's grazing lands

Natural resource management faces a collision between two emerging forces: a changing climate and an increasingly prescriptive set of resource management guidelines, rules and regulations.

This collision is particularly apparent in Australia's natural grazing lands, which occupy more than 40% of the continent.

In these lands, climatic extremes are challenging the functioning of grazed ecosystems, the financial viability of grazing enterprises and government drought policies.

At the same time, land management practices are becoming more prescribed to ensure sustainable management of the valuable natural grazed resource, and to protect downstream assets.

These management 'prescriptions' are explicitly or implicitly based on the assumption that the climate of the next 30 years will be some random sample of the last hundred years. This assumption must be challenged and replaced by a better assessment of future climate risk.

Thus three major questions have to be addressed to achieve the desired outcome of better resource management:

1. Are the current management regulations/rules/guidelines/drought policies flexible enough to adapt to current and future climate change?
   
2.  What changes are necessary to policy and extension advice and community attitudes to:
   (a) ameliorate the impact of damaging climate change;
   (b) facilitate resource and enterprise recovery; and
   (c) maximise opportunities where and when climatic conditions are favourable?
   
3. What policy and management strategies would best protect the grazed natural resource from damage or facilitate improvement?

With his fellowship, Dr McKeon will review and document the forces of changing climate and resource management prescriptions in Australia's grazing lands, and then model, simulate and document the impact of expected climate changes with particular reference to natural resource management issues in Australia's grazing lands.

He will work with graziers, industry and resource management agencies to derive solutions to minimise the emerging impacts and facilitate resource recovery and develop new training modules to complement existing training for land managers.


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