- Title
- Drying and perceptions of climate change: Insights from a Riverina site in the Southern Murray-Darling Basin
- Creator
- Golding, Barry
- Date
- 2010
- Type
- Text; Conference paper
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/31554
- Identifier
- vital:4021
- Abstract
- This paper is based on an analysis of interview data about learning to cope with drier times in the southern Murray-Darling Basin in Australia. Its specific focus is about whether the protracted drying might be related to climate change, based on adult interviewee perceptions in one site in the New South Wales Riverina, The data were collected in 2009 as part of a larger, collaborative, four-site Learning to be drier project. The Riverina site study, from which the data analysed here derive, examined transcript evidence from Hay and Booligal, on the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan Rivers respectively. It looked at how adults in these river-dependent communities have learned to make sense of and cope with significantly diminished rainfall, lower river flows and less water allocations in the past decade. The aim of this particular paper is to investigate how (and whether) adults think about the causes of drier times, in particular about climate change. The paper raises questions about whether lifelong and lifewide mechanisms and processes post-school, particularly in rural, irrigation-dependent communities, are able to properly prepare, train and educate adults to deal with the complex, insidious and often debilitating risks and consequences of a predicted warmer and drier climate associated with climate change. It concludes that new mechanisms and models of learning are required to help adults in Australia to understand, bear the risks and mitigate the impacts of predicted climate change and further drying of the Basin. It argues that radically new ways of learning are required to reach and properly inform the most climate-sensitive sector, agriculture, to make an informed choice about the risks of 'staying on the land' (or not).
- Publisher
- Gold Coast, QLD Proceedings of the 2010 AVETRA Conference
- Relation
- Paper presented at AVETRA Conference 2010
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Adult and community education; Demographics; Lifelong learning; Research
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