Dr Leanne Webb

Science Lead, Asia-Pacific Climate Intelligence, CSIRO

Dr Leanne Webb is currently working as the science lead for the CSIRO Asia-Pacific Climate intelligence team. In this position Leanne draws on more than two decades of experience gained from studying climate change impacts and related adaptation strategies, across many sectors, including agriculture, electricity, finance and health. Agriculture has been Leanne’s foundational research domain, with her doctoral research published in 2007 exploring the potential impacts of climate change on the Australian wine industry.
Over the past seven years, Leanne’s role has shifted to focus on the Pacific region. Here, Leanne has been involved with extracting, evaluating, and processing climate model output for use in Pacific-focused case studies, again across multiple sectors, with the purpose of better informing future planning decisions. Currently, Leanne represents CSIRO’s involvement across multiple Pacific focussed climate-related committees and panels.

ABSTRACT

Climate services for agriculture in Australia and the Pacific

Over the recent few years, two research projects were separately undertaken to support Australia’s and Vanuatu’s agricultural sectors demonstrating how the provision of climate services can help producers identify and understand future challenges. Both projects explored climate change related impacts for different crops, assessing production suitability under current and future climates. Here we consider both the commonalities and differences in the approaches and outputs in providing climate information to farmers in each country. For example, while the web interface of My Climate View (Australia) and the Van-KIRAP climate change portal (Vanuatu) were both designed for sectoral users to access, the Australian project was location specific and Vanuatu’s output was more regional.  We also consider the strengths from both projects and provide actionable recommendations that can be implemented in similar projects going forward.