Climate Change Effect on Wheat Production: Australia is one of the largest producers and exporters of wheat in the world. According to ABARES, wheat production in Australia accounts for 55% of the total agricultural land, wheat is grown on more than half of Australia's cropland making it one of the most important crops produced in Australia. This means that changes in wheat production can have a big impact on global food security, including the lives of farmers. Global food security requires that grain yields continue to increase for the next 30 years, but many yields have stalled in many developed countries. There are many factors contributing to this challenge and climate change could be one of them. For this reason, it is important to investigate how climate change has been affecting the yearly production of wheat in different regions of Australia. In the map above we can see the effects of climate change on wheat production from 1978 to 2015.
Findings: After analyzing the map above we see that in 1978 most regions of southeast Queensland and New South Wales were heavily impacted by climate change. The regions of Maranoa and Walgett were affected by 2%. This might not seem much, but it is a significant change from last year’s percent. In 1983, the impact of climate change for almost all regions of New South Wales and Victoria decreased, but the following year the percent impact increased rapidly. This suggest that variations in climate change can have an immediate effect on wheat crops. From 1983 to 1998 we didn't have any significant changes, until 1999 when regions located in the center of Queensland and New South Wales were heavily affected by climate change. From 2000 to 2003 the impact of climate change decreased in almost all regions of Australia. From 2003 to 2015 the year most heavily impacted by climate change was in 2011. The Southern regions of Queensland and all wheat farms in New South Wales were heavily affected, including the regions of Brewarrina, Wentworth, Balranald, Cobar, Walgett, Coonamble, Bogan, Warren, Lachlan, and Hay. On the other hand, the majority of wheat farms in the Western Australia were hardly impacted by climate change. Overall, these findings reveal that climate change does directly affects the production of wheat in Australia.