Adaptation the key to coping with climate change

Everyday life will have to adapt in all kinds of ways as climate change affects our world. The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research is working hard to make sure we're ready.

By RICHARD PROUDLOVE

When the Abbot Government shut down the Climate Change Commission, it appeared to many that a gulf had suddenly been created between Australian politicians and climate change academics and experts.

As director of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (VCCCAR), Professor Rod Keenan has spent the past four years attempting to bridge that gulf within  the state.

VCCCAR, a partnership between five Victorian universities, was established with Victorian Government funding in 2009.  It conducts research and provides recommendations to the government on how to tackle the impacts of climate change, such as the prospect of rising sea levels, increasing temperatures and more extreme weather events.

Keenan believes that the greatest achievement of VCCCAR so far has been to build a trusting and co-operative relationship between the participating universities and the Victorian Government.  “In terms of having an impact on policy, it is about building those partnerships and relationships,” he says.

Keenan describes himself as a broker.  “I do a lot of listening to people in government and translating that into research, or talk to researchers and then bring them together with the relevant people from the state, local government, the private sector and the community.

“We provide a space where researchers and people from government agencies, local government and in some cases consultancies and private enterprises, who may not normally get together, can talk about climate related issues in an informal setting.”

He has learnt that research must address a range of perspectives held across different government departments.  “Climate change has been considered as a knowledge deficit problem, where it is assumed that if you give the decision-makers the information, they will automatically make the right choices.  Increasingly people are seeing that the problem will be framed differently by different people.  We are moving to an approach to research that is about a continual interaction to exchange information on how each party sees the problem and come up with solutions using that understanding of different perspectives.”

Although not directly related to climate change, erosion of the beach at Portsea is a good example, Keenan says.

“People with houses along the beach are arguing that public investment should go into infrastructure to protect those expensive properties, but in the process they are losing the beach, which is a community asset.  Is there a way in which we can design infrastructure to address those multiple objectives?”

Keenan acknowledges that discussions are not always straightforward “due to conflict or unwillingness to agree on what the issue is”.  Getting the attention and involvement of the right people in government and a clear articulation of their knowledge requirements has also sometimes been challenging.

The list of publications on the VCCCAR website reveals the breadth and variety of research that has been carried out and provides an insight into the extent to which everyday life will have to be adapted to address the impacts of climate change.

Topics such as “building resilience to climate emergencies” may strike a chord with those familiar with the film The Day After Tomorrow, which depicts catastrophic weather events resulting from climate change.

However, the average person may not have considered the link between climate change and health care.  Keenan refers to a case study detailing the approach to climate change adaptation adopted by a care provider supporting disabled people in a rural community.

“The fire in 2009 placed some of their clients and staff under significant risk so they recognised that they have some challenges,” he says.

He suggests that many adaptation measures should be implemented right now since “it is clear that we are not well adapted to our current conditions”.  This view is supported by estimates in the Victorian Government’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan which states that more than $4 billion has been spent over the past 10 years on response and recovery to climate-related events.

However, as Keenan points out, “often it is politically more beneficial to be there when events occur, hand out compensation to the victims and say that we will rebuild”.

Nevertheless, the City of Melbourne is already undertaking initiatives to prepare for climate change.  For example, it plans to increase canopy cover in the city from 22 per cent to 40 per cent by 2040, since shade provided by trees can reduce summer temperatures on city streets by as much as 4 degrees.

Keenan says the community’s initial exposure to climate change adaptation will most likely be communication programs to encourage behavioural change.  These will particularly target those most vulnerable, such as encouraging the elderly to drink more water, stay inside and have neighbours check on them during periods of hot weather.

They will be coupled with improved early warning systems, such as the Bureau of Meteorology’s Heatwave Warning Service, which will commence in 2014 to provide hot weather warnings days in advance.

He believes that building and planning regulations should be reviewed to ensure that the risks of future climate change events are taken into consideration and points to “some innovative examples from Europe” where recreational areas have been designed to fill during flooding so the environment can absorb the water.  He also observes that, as ecosystems become more dynamic, conservation planning will have to be more flexible to allow for the movement of species.

Keenan emphasises that climate change adaptation does not have to be considered as something simply to be “endured”.  It can present opportunities.  In Western Victoria, a significant shift in the climate over the last 15 years has allowed land once only suitable for grazing to be used more lucratively for crops.   He also provides an example of infrastructure implemented in the UK to both rejuvenate a beach and provide commercial opportunities for retailers by making it a more desirable place for the community.

Some experts even believe that climate change adaptation will facilitate positive social change by forcing people to consider the longer term and work together as a community.

However, Keenan emphasises that these positives do not reduce the need for mitigation.  “We always need to keep in mind that with climate change there comes extreme conditions that are potentially going to be quite disastrous” he says.

“My message is that adaptation is a journey, not a destination.  Our understanding of future climate change is evolving so we won’t get to a point where we can say that the City of Melbourne or certain communities are well adapted.  What we want them to be is adapting well to changing future conditions in the climate, the economy and society, all of which affect our capacity to adapt to climate change”.