Australian and global research efforts and resources are behind the pace and insufficient to address the climate change challenges ahead, says economist and the climate change man of the moment, Professor Ross Garnaut.
Speaking at a forum in Canberra Professor Garnaut told a large crowd of researchers and agricultural policy makers that agricultural research in Australia and throughout the world has declined alarmingly in the past 20 years or so.
He believes that for farmers to adapt to, and even capitalise on the big opportunities posed by climate change, more work and investment is urgently needed.
Professor Garnaut, who owns a farm in the Canberra region, said agricultural innovation, forestry innovation and the development of opportunities for biosequestration have transformative potential in relation to the Australian and global mitigation task.
He said the type of challenges early Australians faced in adapting to a new environment would be faced by today's farmers "many many times over" in this new period of climate change, and the success of the future of Australian agriculture would depend on the success of that adaptation.
He said Australia has a big capacity to carry out scientific research, but it was nowhere near enough to handle the big job ahead.
Professor Garnaut said, "There is a new realisation over the past year that there is a very large global challenge of food supplies, and it's beginning to get people thinking again about arresting the decline in that effort.
"We need to do more and better at the higher level climate science and modelling that is really the foundation upon which all the other work related to climate science has to be built."
Professor Garnaut said there were distinctive features of Australia's location and situation requiring a southern hemisphere and Australian based effort on climate change, and proposes the establishment of specialist institute for climate change policy research to help strengthen some of the science capacities he has found "lacking" and "weak" during his work on climate change for the State and Federal Governments.
He said the challenges ahead for Australian agriculture were not all necessarily negative, with one example in the wheat industry pointing to higher productivity in the short to medium term because of the greater concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air. However, higher temperatures would bring this to an end in the longer term, he said.
Biosequestration offers big opportunities he said, yet there would need to be major changes in various carbon accounting in existing trading regimes.
He said currently there are no credits for many of types of biosequestration and to realise any of the potential of these opportunities "we have to get the incentive structure right".
Professor Garnaut will present his final report to Government at the end of this month.
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