Farm-level adaptation options: North East Agricultural Region, Western Australia

Product Information

As Australia’s producers continue to be challenged by increased climate variability and climate change, seeking out region-specific adaptation options is important to ensure regional productivity.

Understanding which adaptation options to pursue in response to climate change remains a challenge, due to uncertainty about the full extent of future climate change, the response of different crops, and future commodity prices and input costs. Combining expert farmer knowledge with both crop and climate science will help to identify a range of effective adaptation options to greatly reduce the negative impacts of climate change.

Here we look at the effectiveness of adaptation options for cropping systems in the North East Agricultural Region (NEAR) of Western Australia, as evaluated by researchers and local producers.

Overall, results suggest that some crop management adaptations have a potentially significant role in maintaining or increasing yields under variable and changing climate conditions. Different adaptation options will be required at a range of spatial scales to deal with the different sets of physical and socioeconomic conditions (climate, soils, production systems etc).