Professor Mark Howden was one of the speakers who caught up with Farmers for Climate Action scholars at a ‘Climate Essential for Farmers’ session.
Photo by
Salty Dingo
Climate boffin Professor Mark Howden has quite a job title.
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He is the director of Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions and he believes farmers can play a major role in reducing carbon emissions.
According to Fiona Marshall, a Farmers for Climate Action scholar, Prof Howden had a horrifying message for those who recently attended his ‘Climate Essentials for Farmers’ presentation hosted by ANU.
“It was intriguing and depressing in equal measures,” Ms Marshall said.
“He provided very practical evidence and advice as to why the climate is changing much quicker than initially expected and what we can do practically to slow it down.”
Prof Howden illustrated how very small changes in temperature upset the balance in weather systems and explained what that would look like in an Australian context.
Ms Marshall, the Riverine Plains chair and a GrainGrowers national policy group member, is halfway through the Farmers for Climate Action climate-smart scholarship and has been blown away by her learnings.
Dr Bec Colvin discussed messaging at the climate session.
“We heard from a range of presenters, climate scientists, social scientists and lawyers who specialised in representing those wanting to farm energy,” she said.
“We gained different perspectives on climate change and how to educate ourselves and others to work towards a lower emissions future.”
Ms Marshall believes the politics of climate change has made the topic a political issue and not a scientific fact, which she considers dangerous.
“We heard from Dr Bec Colvin, who works in the agri-politics space communicating climate change, and she talked about affective polarisation — which is when people oppose something because someone else is for it,” Ms Marshall said.
She said Dr Colvin helped the group understand ways to frame their message so they were more palatable to an audience and also how to bring people along on a journey rather than making them feel attacked or alienated.
Dr Colvin also spoke about how things have changed socially around ‘greenness’ and how farmers were very proactively doing ‘green’ things within their business for a range of reasons.
“We discussed how we can further adapt along the whole value chain,” Ms Marshall said.
“We’ve already adapted crop variety types, stubble retention, planting timing, how we use water and which nutrients we apply.
“We already do so much. Now we need climate-ready crops, and shorter season varieties, we need to be ready for drier finishes and to look at climate sensitive precision agriculture.”
Ms Marshall came away from the session with a clear call to action that she hopes to achieve through her role with Riverine Plains and GrainGrowers.
“We, the farmers, have the power to reduce emissions. We need to stop using fossil fuels as soon as possible,” she said.
“We need to stop releasing that trapped carbon into the atmosphere and we need to find ways to trap the carbon which is in the atmosphere and store it.”
To achieve this, Ms Marshall knows the farming community will need both scientific and political support.
Next, she will be attending the Accounting for Nature course as the final part of the climate-smart scholarship course.
Fiona Marshall is a Farmers for Climate Action scholar.
Fiona Marshall is one of only 20 recipients of a Farmers for Climate Action climate-smart scholarship and Country News has been following her scholarship journey.
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