CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship conducts research that seeks solutions to the challenges posed by climate change. You will contribute to the overall research effort of the Flagship by assessing adaptation options in extensively utilized rangelands. Options for adaptation in rangelands are likely to be more restricted than for more intensive agricultural land uses. This makes them an ideal case study for testing what the limits may be for incremental and transformative adaption options to cope with risks of climate change. From these analyses you will help quantify the residual vulnerability to climate change. The approach will allow scaling up of the analysis via meta-rules and is explicitly targeted at providing information for policy development to enhance adaptation and transformation. The post-doctoral fellow will: 1) develop the underpinning science that enables adaptation assessments in the rangelands. 2) draw from different bodies of theory to develop a sound conceptual approach to assessing adaptation options. 3) apply existing rangeland ecosystem models to reliably simulate ecological, production and economic impacts of future climate and atmospheric changes. 4) explore the effectiveness and limitations of adaptation options to determine the residual vulnerability to the risks of climate change. 5) test this approach in a participatory way with rangeland managers in case studies, both in Australia and internationally. This will provide a practical, theoretically-sound and transferrable basis for more comprehensive assessment of adaptation to climate change. As an aid to policy development, this approach should identify some general principles about the most effective adaptation options and their limitations in agriculture. | 