Climate Change and Agriculture in Australia and Oceania: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Potential.

Many and varied impacts from climate change are expected across Australasia and Oceania.  These include impacts on the low-lying coral atolls in the Pacific, as well as impacts on the major agricultural regions of Australia and New Zealand. Mitigation strategies such as soil-carbon sequestration, improving soil health, changing patterns of land-use, and reducing the carbon footprint of primary products over their full life-cycle will help adaption to, and mitigation of climate change. Adaptation measures may be implemented to help reduce vulnerabilities to climate change, and these include improving water management policies and practices, changes in plant types and breeds, relocation of production to areas with more suitable climate and soils, as well as improving management of our landscape’s natural capital assets to ensure the sustaining of the ecosystem services that flow from them. We present an overview of the likely impacts of climate change ‘Down-Under’, and the adaptation and mitigation options for Australasia and Oceania.