• Rohan Nelson
• CSIRO

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05 October 2009This presentation to the Western Australian Government Department of Food and Agriculture explores the way science informs policy for adapting to climate change.

This 47-minute video sets out the case that there is an urgent need to diversify the types of science we use to examine how Australian society can adapt to climate change.

To date, most public funding for climate-related science has focused on predictive modelling of future climate conditions.

This information is important to demonstrate that climate change is occurring, and that it has largely been induced by emissions of greenhouse gases associated with human activity since the industrial revolution.

Slowly the nature of the public debate has changed from identifying the problem of climate change, to finding solutions to adapt to it. This presentation discusses how institutional inertia in undertaking scientific research to characterise the climate change problem can make it difficult for research to realign with changing societal needs and policy decisions.

For natural resource management, the policy context is diverse and is not just about climate. In agriculture and natural resource management, decision makers need to look at how climate interacts with other threats to the resource base (for example, biophysical threats such as weeds and salinity; economic and market threats and; social issues).

Dr Rohan Nelson explores the question of what the policy needs for climate science might be and how to make science more relevant to policy. Discussing these questions means that the ‘relevance gap’ between the types of questions science is answering, and those being asked by people throughout society, can be reduced.

In this presentation, Dr Nelson explores the evolution of this idea of a potential policy relevance gap surrounding climate change in Australia.

He explores how different approaches to integrating science into policy making can lead to very different outcomes for decision makers in agriculture and natural resource management and shows how innovative interdisciplinary forms of science can be used to inform policy and decision making around the complex mix of human and environmental problems and opportunities created by a changing climate.

Watch the video here>