1 | Drought & changing climate: the future for farmers and growers?

Over the past few years, the Deep South Challenge, Resilience Challenge and Our Land and Water National Science Challenges, along with several other NZ science programmes, have funded research projects that focus on drought and its impacts.

In this webinar "Drought and the changing climate: what does the future look like for famers and growers?" we will cover the most recent projections of changing drought risk out to the end of the century, how this is modelled and how the science has progressed. From projecting forward to understanding the past, we will also look at extreme events that have occurred; how climate modelling is investigating the fraction of risk of these events can be attributable to climate change, and estimating how much this has cost us.

This information forms the basis of guidance and planning at a regional and national level and can give an insight into what the future may look like for farmers and growers in a changing climate.

Webinar Speakers

Webinar host: Josh Te Kani Josh is a specialist in Māori communications with a background in iwi broadcasting and iwi council/crown engagement. As the Vision Mātauranga Knowledge Broker for the Resilience Challenge, Josh works to increase the understanding of Mātauranga Māori and our cultural capability, enabling effective iwi engagement and enhancing our research to give enduring results for our communities.

Andrew Tait Andrew is NIWA’s Chief Scientist for Climate, Atmosphere and Hazards. He specializes in applications of climate data and products, and climate change impacts and adaptation research. He has previously been seconded to the Ministry for Primary Industries to work on the Primary Sector Science Roadmap and to the Department of Conservation to build internal capacity around the utilisation of climate data and climate change projections. Andrew is a lead author of the Australasia chapter of the IPCC Fifth Assessment WGII Report, a member of the WMO Commission for Climatology (CCl) executive, co-chair of the WMO CCl Focus Area on 'Climate Services for Societal Benefits', and the previous chair of the Pacific Islands Climate Services Panel.

Dr Suzanne Rosier is a climate scientist at NIWA in Wellington. She played a key part in helping launch weather@home ANZ to the public, and has subsequently analysed the large NZ datasets with a particular focus on extreme rainfall. Her new weather@home ANZ experiments are looking into how weather and climate extremes might be different a few decades from now.

Luke Harrington is a Senior Research Fellow at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute. Luke's research looks at how climate change is making extreme weather events more likely or more intense, with a particular focus on the methods used to come up with these answers. Luke's research in 2016 culminated in the first comprehensive attribution study of a New Zealand drought (the 2012/13 event), which has informed subsequent Treasury estimates of the cost of climate change from worsening drought impacts. Luke is now looking at better ways to understand and quantify changes in both extreme heat stress and drought over the next several decades, as well as their health and economic impacts.

This webinar is part of: Growing Kai Under Increasing Dry, a rolling symposium on drought, climate change and primary sector resilience

What is a rolling symposium? Three short background webinars, bringing you the latest in climate projections, drought resilience research and land-use science, culminating in an all-day event to generate evidence-based conversation around future drought policy.

Find more about the other events in our rolling symposium:

• Webinar Two: Drought and the changing climate: farm profits and community resilience
• Webinar Three: Drought and the changing climate: What to grow and where?
• In Person Symposium Event: Growing Kai Under Increasing Dry: A rolling symposium on drought, climate change and primary sector resilience