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Drought, agricultural production and climate change – A way forward to a better understanding

Authors: Anthony Clark, Andrew Tait

Executive summary

This project has been tasked with establishing clear and practical directions that will improve drought and climate change analysis for New Zealand’s agriculture. The rationale is to increase awareness of drought and climate change risks, and develop a mechanism that will improve the preparedness and adaptive capacity of the agricultural sector. The key insight emerging from this project is that while New Zealand has made excellent progress in developing methodologies in climate and agricultural sciences, further work can be done in terms of integration and some key areas of specialist research.

Based on an end user workshop and review of current methodologies, the report recommends that New Zealand develop a programme of research that encompasses applied risk analysis and enabling science initiatives to maintain high levels of innovation. A draft research programme is developed and presented, which proposes a number of projects as a way of progressing drought and climate change risk analysis for New Zealand. A summary is presented on page 64 of this report.

Key enabling research projects include: developing a climate change database and toolkit suitable for use by agricultural researchers; developing a drought and climate change monitoring network; continued development and application of whole farm models and integration with macroeconomic modelling systems; and development of irrigation and groundwater resource modelling capacity.

To ensure high levels of integration a number of applied analysis projects are also proposed including: estimating of trends, production and economic impacts, including updating previous drought risk analysis under climate change; assessment of drought risk management practices to examine climate change resilience; the production of fact sheets documenting specific climate change adaptations; and a national audit of irrigation water resources.

Contact for Enquiries

Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change
MAF
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526, Wellington
Tel: 0800 CLIMATE (254 628)
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