Climate change impacts

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems (CSE) conducts research and development across a range of landscapes, targeting social, economic and environmental sustainability.

The Water for a Healthy Country Flagship is a national research program addressing one of Australia’s most pressing natural resource issues – sustainable management of our water resources.

Traditional Owners, indigenous academics, land council representatives, indigenous agency management staff, Natural Resource Management board members, and scientists from across Australia will meet today in Mildura for a CSIRO National Indigenous Science and Research Roundtable (NISRR).

Scientists and water managers from around the Murray-Darling Basin will meet in Sydney this week to discuss how the health of ecosystems across the Basin will respond to future water availability in the context of a changing climate.

This project is identifying the biophysical, economic and social opportunities for remote communities relating to land management for greenhouse gas abatement, with a focus on fire management in tropical savannas.

CSIRO's Healthy Terrestrial Ecosystems theme brings together multi-disciplinary teams to develop new technologies and approaches to promote ecosystem function and prediction to inform biodiversity management, planning and incentives.

We focus on finding new, integrated ways to manage our water supply and water resources issues. This includes land use change, salinity, climate change, groundwater extraction and drainage schemes. 

CSIRO’s understanding of the potential impacts of climate change on natural and planted forests is helping forestry and natural resource managers prepare for the future.

Dr Peter Caccetta talks about his work helping to change the way remote sensing data is used in Australia in this video. (3:00)

New plastics developed by CSIRO, Hanyang University Korea and the University of Texas have the potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and help purify water and CSIRO research leader Dr Anita Hill discusses this research in this vodcast. (2:20)

When oceanographer Dr George Cresswell joined CSIRO as a physicist in the late 1960s, astronauts were sending back some of the first images of earth – and its oceans.

The Gungahlin Homestead in the Australian Capital Territory, is an historic site in the north of Canberra that now serves as head office for CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

This article from Farming Ahead contains four stories on groundwater, adapting to climate change, assessing a ‘green’ agricultural system and cover cropping. (1 page)

The suggestion that new forests might increase global warming through methane emissions is tested in this paper. (5 pages)

The oceans are the largest repository of heat on Earth, with a capacity 1 000 times greater than the atmosphere. This heat is distributed around the globe by ocean currents referred to as the ‘conveyor belt’. This circulation influences, and is influenced by, the climate.

Although we are aware of the ways our climate is shaping changes on the land, we are less familiar with change beneath the waves of the worlds’ oceans and coastal waterways, and the influences that our oceans and our changing climate have on each other.