Expected future climate change poses a threat to the global food supply, as rising greenhouse gases drive warming beyond current levels. This warming is expected to alter the timing, intensity, and variability of precipitation, contribute to sea-level rise, and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall, droughts, and heatwaves. Consequently, rising temperatures will subject livestock to greater heat stress, may negatively impact crop yields, and shift pest and disease dynamics into regions more suitable for their spread.

As we rapidly enter a strong El Niño phase, there is a high likelihood of worsened drought conditions in some parts of New Zealand and heavy rainfall in others. While the unpredictable nature of El Niño and La Niña complicates forecasts, it is well understood that, alongside the ongoing global warming trend, future ENSO events will bring more severe weather, heightening the risk of frequent and intense damage to food production systems.

Food producers face a challenging reality where extreme weather events could jeopardise their roles as suppliers to large export companies. To protect their futures, landowners need, and want, to understand how evolving climate regimes may impact their management practices.

Currently, climate assessment reports for non-urban areas in New Zealand often lack the detail farmers require to make informed decisions in response to a changing climate. These reports tend to focus on urban impacts and rely on weather data from locations far from rural areas. At Prism, we have developed a Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CRVA) at the farm scale (~5 km) to help landowners understand how climate-related hazards will evolve on their properties.

A CRVA identifies factors influencing vulnerability and risk, including direct effects such as rising temperatures, sea-level rise, and changing precipitation patterns, as well as indirect effects like water insecurity, heat-related stressors, disease spread, economic disruption, and biodiversity loss. This method has been used internationally in urban and agricultural climate risk analyses, in both urban and agricultural settings.

Our approach uses patterns from the past to understand the future. A key metric for that is using local weather data – that’s either from landowners’ personal stations or nearby virtual stations (~5 km grid). Through this we gain detailed insights into local weather manifestations. Additionally, we evaluate management system vulnerabilities by considering tree cover, shade, soil properties, fire risk, and slope, integrating landowner interviews to build a comprehensive property profile. This approach ultimately helps determine the relative risk across different climate impact categories, which we provide in summary reports with summary graphics to the landowner.

As a known approach to translating complex climate projections into contextual, meaningful terms, the CRVA enables us to confidently guide landowners in identifying where to focus efforts to mitigate future exposure to risk and vulnerability.