Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

Among the commercial farmers, backyard gardeners and growers we spoke with, therewas a degree of generalised scepticism about the empirical reality of anthropogenicclimate change, but some have portrait clear climatic changes or events that havesignificantly affected their food production capabilities. Scepticism appears to bereflected also in the current Victorian and Queensland administrations, withinterviewees reporting a strong strain of climate scepticism and even denial amongstleading politicians. By contrast, urban agricultural practitioners and researchers withwhom we spoke firmly believed that climate change would affect food production.The research revealed that there is, as expected, a mixed reaction towards theexistence and the impacts of climate on food security (or food production) in Australia.Ranging from politicians, to commercial farmers to hobby gardeners, climate changescepticism and even denialism was evident. One of the most concerning revelationswas the perceived lack of concern about climate change among some politicians:In their [politicians] worldview, climate variability, resource constraints, land useconflicts, none of that figures into their calculations. In general, they are climatechange deniers. Climate change is an economic problem…[and] now we’rebasically not talking about it at all, it’s fallen to the wayside...to the point that theyhave even cut the climate change unit in DPC…[but] this wave of denialism, andanti-science, is not unique in Victoria, it’s across Australia [state governmentemployee].The recently elected Mayor of the Gold Coast, whilst not rejecting scientific evidenceabout climate change, has been reported recently as saying that it is simply too faraway in time for him to be concerned about sea level rise:I don't intend to use our ratepayers' funds for something that is going to happenin 90 years. It may or may not be wiped out...I live on the water and what mayhappen to my house in 90 years is not my concern (Gold Coast Bulletin, 27/9/12).Many commercial and hobby farmers expressed their disregard for climate change,often suggesting that this was a natural event. For example, an older dairy farmer fromthe Mornington Peninsula, who began farming in 1973, expressed his disdain towardsclimate change:The climate’s been changing for millennia. I don’t think there’s anything that’shappening now that’s out of the ordinary. We’ve had droughts before. We’vehad rain before. We’ve had wet years before, and similar patterns to the last 10-15 years… In geological terms, we’re pissing in the wind. Nobody wants to hearthat. It’s good going and planting trees and all that, but the environment, where Igrew up, is so different now to when I was a kid [Dairy farmer, Melbourne].A major commercial horticulturalist from the same region, whose family had beengrowing for a number of generations, shared his scepticism and disdain towards thevery proposition that anthropogenic climate change existed as a phenomenon, albeit ina somewhat contradictory manner:Climate change is all bullshit, people just jumping on the bandwagon. Nature hasto take its course, we can’t stop it, we can’t control nature. There was ten years ofdrought in Clyde, but now the weather’s changed again. There are sometimesearly springs, and early summers. If that happens, we adapt, we do the best weUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 127