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."