By Joanna Grigg

Dr Nick Cradock-Henry did his PhD on climate change adaptation in the Bay of Plenty. He now spends a fair bit of time visiting regional New Zealand helping plan ways to adapt to climate change, leading a four-year MPI-funded project ‘Adaptation Pathways’. Since September, he has worked for GNS Science as principal scientist.

The idea for the project is to help growers and farmers develop actions and attitudes to anticipate and reduce climate change risks. This will buffer negative effects and may strengthen business sustainability. Businesses are likely to be more prepared and more successful, he says.

The project is not about mitigating emissions (e.g. cutting emissions from sheep through feed or bolus). Nick says it’s about preparing for hotter, colder, warmer, drier, extreme rainfall, flash droughts – all the events that can come with climate change.

In 2019 he ran the ruler over New Zealand primary industry knowledge of climate adaptation to see what was “known, not known, needed”. While ideas of what to do were there, what was lacking was understanding of the decisions and actions needed to do it. There were gaps in at-risk regions and sectors, lack of understanding around seasonal-based responses, and other obstacles to change.

The project idea grew out of a regional planning exercise in Hawke's Bay, where Nick helped the regional council prepare for climate change. He had worked in the region on freshwater management using a collaborative approach, so built on this opportunity and his networks to start primary industry workshops looking at adaptation.

The workshops are now being rolled out across Marlborough, Northland and Canterbury – chosen because there was a lack of information for these areas. A range of people across land and water-based industries, service industries and local government are invited to brainstorm.

Nick believes the first step is understanding the values and attitudes of farmers and growers.

“How you adapt might be driven by preserving a particular identity, like being a sheep farmer, or keeping a land use. Keeping farming beef instead of changing to a forester is one example I saw in Hawke’s Bay.”

The next step in the workshop is developing solutions. Short-term examples might be increasing supplementary feed and installing irrigation. Breeding for heat-tolerant genetics and selection of persistent crops with deeper roots are longer-term examples. They need more investment and time and collaboration, Nick says.

The workshops are also about building relationships within a region. “This helps collaboration.”

He gives the example of a Hawke’s Bay solution to water allocation, where different parties (dairy, sheep/beef farms, vineyards) agreed to water-takes at different times of the year, fitting with farm requirements. This allowed more people to have some access to water.

Adaptation is not just a scientific problem, he says.

“It’s a social question, as much as science and economic.”

Primary industries that can anticipate and reduce identifiable risks and are buffered against unexpected risk are more likely to be successful.

Nick says a lot of research has been done on dairy, far less on sheep and beef adaptation. An example is the 2013 review of climate-change effects and adaptation options for temperate pasture-based dairy farming systems (2013). Dairy farmers can find this on the Science Direct website.

The project is funded by MPI’s Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change Fund. It’s about one third of the way through. The final part is bringing workshop participants together from across regions.

“The idea is to share insights, experiences and support one another in adapting to change,” Nick says.