Climate change issues and impacts in the Wet Tropics NRM cluster region
Hilbert, David W., Hill, Rosemary, Moran, Catherine, Turton, Stephen M., Bohnet, Iris C., Marshall, Nadine A., Pert, Petina L., Stoeckl, Natalie, Murphy, Helen T., Reside, April E., Laurance, Susan G.W., Alamgir, Mohammed, Coles, Rob, Crowley, Gabriel, Curnock, Matt, Dale, Allan, Duke, Norman C., Esparon, Michelle, Farr, Marina, Gillet, Sarah, Gooch, Margaret, Fuentes, Mariana, Hamann, Mark, James, Cassandra S., Kroon, Frederieke J., Larson, Silva, Lyons, Pethie, Marsh, Helene, Meyer Steiger, Dagmar, Sheaves, Marcus, and Westcott, David (2014) Climate change issues and impacts in the Wet Tropics NRM cluster region. Report. James Cook University, Cairns, QLD, Australia.
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Abstract
{Extract] Rationale and scope: Stream 2 of the Regional NRM Planning for Climate Change Fund supports the project "Knowledge to manage land and sea: A framework for the future" run by a consortium of scientists from James Cook University (JCU) and CSIRO. This report is the first major product of the consortium project. It is not an in-depth review of the literature that already exists for some NRM sectors. Rather, it is syntheses of current knowledge through expert opinion about the threats and potential impacts of climate change in the Wet Tropics Cluster (WTC) region across all sectors. This report focuses on four geographically distinct NRM regions grouped in the WTC: Mackay-Whitsunday, Wet Tropics, Cape York, and the Torres Strait regions, which are managed by Reef Catchments NRM, Terrain NRM, Cape York NRM, and the Torres Strait Regional Authority respectively.
The report is framed by the specific topics and issues defined by the NRM groups in the WTC region, reflecting their planning processes and priorities of these groups as well as the characteristics of their regional communities.
The focus of this report is on possible impacts and threats, not adaptation options that will be discussed in a future report. Chapter 9 discusses the science of adaptation in a general sense and mitigation opportunities relating to carbon storage are discussed in a section of Chapter 6.
The report presents key messages around each topic and issue in bold type in each chapter. Key messages for NRM groups are also summarised at the beginning of each chapter. These key messages represent our syntheses of expected threats and impacts based on expert opinion but also substantiated by published sources. Each key message is followed by a brief explanation of the underlying scientific support with a small number of key citations to the relevant literature. In most cases there is a fair amount of uncertainty associated with the key messages and they should be understood as best estimates based on expert opinion.
Much of the uncertainty about potential impacts is due to the climate model uncertainty about changes in rainfall amount and timing that are critical variables that will influence many sectors in the WTC region. Another source of uncertainty for some topics and issues is limited or lack of direct research on climate change impacts across several of the key NRM sectors in the WTC region.
The main conclusions and summaries for each synthesis chapter (by NRM sector) are presented below with a final chapter on adaptation science.
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