Climate Change
Land managers may adopt short- and long-term measures to adapt to climate change impacts.
Short-term measures include changes in agronomic practices, such as changes in crop varieties and date of planting and harvesting, and changes in external inputs, such as fertilisers and pesticides. A number of these measures are likely to be undertaken incrementally by the farmer as a matter of course.
Long-term measures include changes in land use, development of more robust crop types, substitution of crops, modification of microclimate and irrigation; and changes in farming systems for a geographical locality.
A key to understanding if and how adaptation will take place is the world view of land managers. People’s world views and their corresponding attitudes are often barriers to uptake of adaptations to climate change – the question is how can these be changed? Factors that influence people’s attitudes to change include their age, peer influence, interaction with wider society (e.g. family members working in city, internet, media), and advice from policy makers. Being aware of climate change itself, and seeing evidence of it, is likely to influence attitudes to adaptation.
We propose to explore some of these issues using an agent-based modelling approach to support the development and refinement of mitigation and adaptation scenarios for rural land-use at a national scale and over a timescale up to 2050 or beyond. The work will concentrate on the interactions between government policy, public opinion, climate-related events, and the socio-economic motivations of rural land managers. For example, extreme weather events will make mitigation policies more salient to the general public, and hence bring social pressure to bear on land managers, which may in turn alter the cost-benefit balance between policy options.
Both the mitigation and adaptation work is informed by interactions with stakeholders using Q-methodology. Q-methodology is a controlled technique for eliciting structures of subjectivity.
More on changing landscapes and climate change
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Updated: 10 Jan 2012, Content by: RM
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