Elephants in the Kitchen: Responding to the Challenge of Rapidly Changing Climate and Land Use

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Author(s)
Mackey, Brendan
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2018
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• The impacts of human-forced climate change will continue to be felt for millennia, irrespective of our success or failure to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
• Therefore, climate change adaptation must be understood as a ‘forever’ activity and mainstreamed in policy, planning and decision-making.
• In parallel, we are witnessing unprecedented land use change in terms of extent and intensification that is transforming the land surface, together with subsurface processes, in ways as profound as climate change.
• Policies and programs that aim to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from the land sector will continue to be ...
View more >• The impacts of human-forced climate change will continue to be felt for millennia, irrespective of our success or failure to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. • Therefore, climate change adaptation must be understood as a ‘forever’ activity and mainstreamed in policy, planning and decision-making. • In parallel, we are witnessing unprecedented land use change in terms of extent and intensification that is transforming the land surface, together with subsurface processes, in ways as profound as climate change. • Policies and programs that aim to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from the land sector will continue to be a key component of Australia’s response to its Paris Agreement commitments. • We have the data and information to address these emerging pressures; however, we lack the public understanding, political will and national policy to require their use.
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View more >• The impacts of human-forced climate change will continue to be felt for millennia, irrespective of our success or failure to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. • Therefore, climate change adaptation must be understood as a ‘forever’ activity and mainstreamed in policy, planning and decision-making. • In parallel, we are witnessing unprecedented land use change in terms of extent and intensification that is transforming the land surface, together with subsurface processes, in ways as profound as climate change. • Policies and programs that aim to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from the land sector will continue to be a key component of Australia’s response to its Paris Agreement commitments. • We have the data and information to address these emerging pressures; however, we lack the public understanding, political will and national policy to require their use.
View less >
Book Title
Land use in Australia: Past, Present and Future
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Environmental management not elsewhere classified