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Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change is a fundamental resource for primary industry professionals, land managers, policy makers, researchers and students involved in preparing Australia's primary industries for the challenges and opportunities of climate change. More than 30 authors have contributed to this book, which moves beyond describing the causes and consequences of climate change to providing options for people to work towards adaptation action. Climate change implications and adaptation options are given for the key Australian primary industries of horticulture, forestry, grains, rice, sugarcane, cotton, viticulture, broadacre grazing, intensive livestock industries, marine fisheries, and aquaculture and water resources. Case studies demonstrate the options for each industry. Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change summarises updated climate change scenarios for Australia with the latest climate science. It includes chapters on socio-economic and institutional considerations for adapting to climate change, greenhouse gas emissions sources and sinks, as well as risks and priorities for the future.

The book advances knowledge about climate change adaptation practices through a series of case studies. It presents important evidence about adaptation practices in agriculture, businesses, the coastal zone, community services, disaster management, ecosystems, indigneous populations, and settlements and infrastructure. In addition to 38 case studies across these sectors, the book contains horizon-scoping essays from international experts in adaptation research, including Hallie Eakin, Susanne Moser, Jonathon Overpeck, Bill Solecki, and Gary Yohe. Australia's social-ecological systems have a long history of adapting to climate variability and change, and in recent decades has been a world-leader in implementing and researching adaptation, making this book of universal relevance to all those working to adapt our environment and societies to climate change.

A multispecies outbreak of Nocardia occurred among heart transplant recipients (HTR), but not lung transplant recipients (LTR), in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, during 2018-2019. We performed a retrospective review of 23 HTR and LTR who had Nocardia spp. infections during June 2015-March 2021, compared risk factors for Nocardia infection, and evaluated climate conditions before, during, and after the period of the 2018-2019 outbreak. Compared with LTR, HTR had a shorter median time from transplant to Nocardia diagnosis, higher prevalence of diabetes, greater use of induction immunosuppression with basiliximab, and increased rates of cellular rejection before Nocardia diagnosis. During the outbreak, Sydney experienced the lowest monthly precipitation and driest surface levels compared with time periods directly before and after the outbreak. Increased immunosuppression of HTR compared with LTR, coupled with extreme weather conditions during 2018-2019, may explain this outbreak of Nocardia infections in HTR.

\"Bushfires in Australia are wildfires common throughout Australia due in part to the country’s hot and dry climate. Many wildfires start in the remote countryside known to Australians as the bush. Bushfires can be extremely destructive, especially if they reach urban areas. The fires damage forests and farmland and can lead to many deaths and much loss of property.\" (World Book Student) Learn more about Australia's bushfires. Some of the most destructive bushfires in Australian history are mentioned.

Retrofitting works have become increasingly important in the construction industry as they play an effective role in providing solutions to maintain, upgrade or change the functions of existing or aged buildings. Very often, safety issues of retrofitting works are underestimated as such works are normally considered small projects/works, in which the accidents might not be reported in the short term. Therefore, qualitative indicators (i.e. safety climate and safety behaviour) have become significant contributors in evaluating the organisational safety performance. This article aimed to examine the relationship between the safety climate and safety performance in the retrofitting works context. The safety climate of retrofitting works was measured by adopting the NOSACQ-50 questionnaire, while the safety performance was examined by three indicators comprising safety compliance, safety participation, and occupational injuries. A total of 264 valid questionnaire responses were collected from the local retrofits work sites in Australia. PLS-SEM technique was used to examine the relationship and estimate the parameters of the structural model. The results indicate that there is a significant positive relationship (0.60) between safety climate and safety performance in retrofitting works.

Following a lifetime observing Australia and its people, Tom Keneally turns inwards to reflect on what has been important to him.

Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are expected to modify the global water cycle with significant consequences for terrestrial hydrology. We assess the impact of climate change on hydrological droughts in a multimodel experiment including seven global impact models (GIMs) driven by bias-corrected climate from five global climate models under four representative concentration pathways (RCPs). Drought severity is defined as the fraction of land under drought conditions. Results show a likely increase in the global severity of hydrological drought at the end of the 21st century, with systematically greater increases for RCPs describing stronger radiative forcings. Under RCP8.5, droughts exceeding 40% of analyzed land area are projected by nearly half of the simulations. This increase in drought severity has a strong signal-to-noise ratio at the global scale, and Southern Europe, the Middle East, the Southeast United States, Chile, and South West Australia are identified as possible hotspots for future water security issues. The uncertainty due to GIMs is greater than that from global climate models, particularly if including a GIM that accounts for the dynamic response of plants to CO ₂ and climate, as this model simulates little or no increase in drought frequency. Our study demonstrates that different representations of terrestrial water-cycle processes in GIMs are responsible for a much larger uncertainty in the response of hydrological drought to climate change than previously thought. When assessing the impact of climate change on hydrology, it is therefore critical to consider a diverse range of GIMs to better capture the uncertainty.

Coarse resolution global climate models (GCMs) cannot resolve fine-scale drivers of regional climate, which is the scale where climate adaptation decisions are made. Regional climate models (RCMs) generate high-resolution projections by dynamically downscaling GCM outputs. However, evidence of where and when downscaling provides new information about both the current climate (added value, AV) and projected climate change signals, relative to driving data, is lacking. Seasons and locations where CORDEX-Australasia ERA-Interim and GCM-driven RCMs show AV for mean and extreme precipitation and temperature are identified. A new concept is introduced, ‘realised added value’, that identifies where and when RCMs simultaneously add value in the present climate and project a different climate change signal, thus suggesting plausible improvements in future climate projections by RCMs. ERA-Interim-driven RCMs add value to the simulation of summer-time mean precipitation, especially over northern and eastern Australia. GCM-driven RCMs show AV for precipitation over complex orography in south-eastern Australia during winter and widespread AV for mean and extreme minimum temperature during both seasons, especially over coastal and high-altitude areas. RCM projections of decreased winter rainfall over the Australian Alps and decreased summer rainfall over northern Australia are collocated with notable realised added value. Realised added value averaged across models, variables, seasons and statistics is evident across the majority of Australia and shows where plausible improvements in future climate projections are conferred by RCMs. This assessment of varying RCM capabilities to provide realised added value to GCM projections can be applied globally to inform climate adaptation and model development.

Observational studies of extreme daily and subdaily precipitation–temperature sensitivities (apparent scaling) aim to provide evidence and improved understanding of how extreme precipitation will respond to a warming climate. However, interpretation of apparent scaling results is hindered by large variations in derived scaling rates and divergence from theoretical and modeled projections of systematic increases in extreme precipitation intensities (climate scaling). In warmer climatic regions, rainfall intensity has been reported to increase with temperature to a maximum before decreasing, creating a second-order discontinuity or \"hook\"-like structure. Here we investigate spatial and temporal discrepancies in apparent scaling results by isolating rainfall events and conditioning event precipitation on duration. We find that previously reported negative apparent scaling at higher temperatures that creates the hook structure is the result of a decrease in the duration of the precipitation event, and not a decrease in the precipitation rate. We introduce standardized pooling using long records of Australian station data across climate zones to show average precipitation intensities and 1-h peak precipitation intensities increase with temperature across all event durations and locations investigated. For shorter-duration events (<6h), average precipitation intensity scaling is in line with the expected Clausius–Clapeyron (CC) relation at ~7% °C⁻¹, and this decreases with increasing duration, down to 2% °C⁻¹ at 24-h duration. Consistent with climate scaling derived from model projections, 1-h peak precipitation intensities are found to increase with temperature at elevated rates compared to average precipitation intensities, with super-CC scaling (10%–14% °C⁻¹) found for short-duration events in tropical climates.