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Australia's peanut farmers are on the move and some are relocating nearly 2,400 kilometres away for better access to water; last year 88 people in Victoria died on the way to hospital as a result of the heat wave that preceded the disastrous bushfires in early February; the average temperature across the Australian continent has risen by more than 0.8°C in the past 60 years; the Great Barrier Reef is degrading; and more than 40% of the nation's farmers are seriously worried about the viability of their businesses in the face of climate change.These are just some of the effects of climate change unveiled by academics, scientists, social scientists and public servants from universities, research institutes and government agencies at a Universities Australia National Policy Forum held at Parliament House in Canberra in March. The contributors provided unequivocal evidence that climate change was occurring across Australia, that it was accelerating and that its impact on society and the national economy was already apparent. Universities Australia is the peak industry body representing Australia's 39 universities in the public interest, nationally and internationally. The forum was held at Parliament House to attract the attention of the politicians who, for the most part, have paid little mind to tackling the problems caused by climate change. Speakers at the forum backed the detailed measurements of climate change presented in a report released just before the forum by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Farmers are among the first to feel the impact of climate change. Already the peanut industry had assessed its future and a part had decided to move, said Professor Graham Baker and Dr Roger Stone from the University of Southern Queensland. They noted that the cotton industry was also undergoing a consultation process about where it was headed while the rice crop in the Riverina had dropped from a million tonnes a year to less than 50,000. The harvest date for wine growers has been moving a day earlier each year since 1980, according to data accumulated by Professor Snow Barlow of Melbourne University's school of land and environment. Snow is a professor of horticulture and viticulture and Convener of a primary industries adaptation research network. He said dry-land crops were being sown later and harvested earlier. This added to the evidence of changes in the timing of the life cycles of flowering plants and birds, according to his colleague, Dr Marie Keatley of the university's department of forest and ecosystems. "In many places in Australia, such as grain-cropping in the Mallee in northern Victoria, we are getting to the limits of adaptive management where farmers can change what they are doing within their existing system," Barlow said. "Given the climate data from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, it won't be too long before we have to consider changing our agriculture systems entirely." But not all the news was bad, said Professor Amanda Lynch from the school of geography and environmental sciences at Monash University in Melbourne: "By an accident of our geography, Australia is a country that is subjected to very large changes over a decadal time scale because of the El Niño phenomenon. "So we already have an agricultural sector and a water management sector that is used to large swings over long time scales. We are used to pragmatic, messy, contingent approaches."