ABSTRACT
The pace of human-induced climate change and its projected threats to livelihoods, lives, cultures and even nations creates an imperative to adapt rapidly across many parts of society. This imperative implies that adaptation will need to be a conscious and considered process of assessing and responding to threats and opportunities at various scales. Yet many impacts of climate change, at local and regional scales especially, will not be known until they have commenced or been in train for some time. Our limited ability to predict means the impacts of climate change will often be surprising. Threats that we have in our sights may not be the ones we need to be prepared for (Barnett and Adger, 2007). In agriculture, for instance, it is likely that farming systems developed over hundreds or thousands of years and geared to a particular climate regime will need to change. It is unlikely that anyone will be able to consistently predict the system changes that will be most adaptive. Nevertheless, adaptation will always proceed as a social process, informed variously by the knowledge of lay people, scientists and policy makers. In this chapter, I outline some fundamental aspects of the challenge of integrating knowledge for successful adaptation and what this means for engaging the public in assessing vulnerability and building adaptive capacity. I do so largely via description of a particularly instructive case: managing climate variability in Australian agriculture.
