Professor Lauren Rickards on Australia’s rocky road from “sunburnt country” to climate change reality
From growing up as a “greenie” in a family of farmers to studying the Millennial drought and becoming an IPCC author, Professor Lauren Rickards knows better than most the rocky ground climate adaptation conversations have ridden in Australia. With climate shocks only getting worse, the leading thinker, advisor and researcher explains to Sarah Smith why now is the time for radical and urgent collaboration.
Lauren Rickards was raised with an acute awareness of the tensions that exist in Australia’s climate debates. She grew up in a “back to the earth” home, complete with mudbricks, homemade clothes and a poster of David Suzuki pinned to her bedroom wall. But she also came from a long line of farmers – no less than 50 of her Mum’s cousins (plus her grandparents) were dairy farmers from Western Victoria. Her parents met studying Agriculture Science.
At the time, there was very little nuance in conversations between farmers and environmentalists. Each side viewed the other as the problem – but that binary didn’t reflect Lauren’s experience. She’d watched her grandparents save a bush block on their farm to protect the koalas and lizards that lived there. She saw first hand the impact of floods and droughts on families who worked the land. She knew neither farmers nor “greenies” were the enemy. “I grew up with two very, very different sets of conversations, and I often felt like a translator between those conversations,” Lauren explains.
This early exposure to the often oversimplified nature of climate narratives in Australia has fueled Lauren’s life’s work as a leading thinker, advisor and researcher on the social dimensions of climate change. When she first started studying Environmental Change and Management in the early 90s, climate change was just emerging in the discourse. “Back then, it was discussed as a distant future risk, rather than a near and present danger – and primarily as a risk for people in the world who were already highly disadvantaged and vulnerable,” she explains. “So the true seriousness of it – the scale, the scope and the wide systemic effects – were really not recognised at all.”
While a lot has changed, there still remains a lack of collective understanding about how we should deal with climate change. “This concept of how we respond to climate change is far more complex than was first anticipated,” she says. “Over the years it’s become clear that the rational ideal – that we would learn about the problem, incorporate that information into our decision-making and take adequate actions to avert the problem – has not really worked.”
“This concept of how we respond to climate change is far more complex than was first anticipated”
Lauren identifies her long-term study into the effects of the Millennium Drought (1997–2010) on Australian farming communities, and a 2014 review into the barriers to effective climate change mitigation by senior decision makers, as key pillars in shaping an understanding of Australia’s approach to climate adaptation. “We've been on quite a bit of a roller coaster around adaptation in this country,” she says.
Because Australia is one of the most climate-variable continents in the world, climate conversations here have long been subject to what Lauren describes as “the Dorothea Mackellar effect”. That is, a view of ourselves as described in Mackellar’s iconic 1908 poem: I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains/Of ragged mountain ranges/Of droughts and flooding rains. “Because of this, a lot of early work in the climate space was focused on differences between weather, climatic variability and climate change,” she explains.
“Such framing resulted in a hyper-focus within climate change conversations on the long-term variables – such as increasing background temperatures and shifts in precipitation. Which was useful to a degree but, in hindsight, also obscured the fact that climate variability such as droughts is not an ‘other’ to climate change – it’s itself being altered by climate change and is worsening as well. That’s to say, because of climate change we now have more intense, frequent and unpredictable climate variability,” Lauren says. “And I was part of the fairly painful intellectual evolution that led to that kind of understanding.”
This evolution has also included no small amount of political “blips”. Australia’s National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility was gradually defunded between 2014 and 2018 under successive Coalition governments. “We had this very odd experience of being international leaders in climate change adaptation research, to suddenly just falling over the cliff,” Lauren says. And while things are getting back on track, with researchers, policymakers and practitioners recently coming together for a national conference in Perth, there’s now years-long gaps in research in an area that can least afford it. “Although we've been very active, we haven't been keeping pace with the impacts, and so you've still got this adaptation research gap and a related adaptation deficit in practice,” she says.
“How systemic, fast and pervasive climate change impacts are, continues to shock even those of us who work on them”
It’s one of the reasons that Lauren and Regen Melbourne are relaunching the Climate Change Exchange (CCE) –originally founded by Susie Moloney and Karyn Bosomworth in 2019. “In 2025, adaptation research is being done by a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily identify, first and foremost, as a climate change adaptation scholar – so the space has really diversified over the years,” Lauren says. “And because there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, sometimes behind closed doors, research on adaptation can be harder to find because it's dispersed and diverse. The unmet need to bring this together and make it more accessible and responsive to practitioners is one of the reasons we think there’s an imminent and really valuable place for the CCE.”
The aim of the CCE is to support rigorous and reflective collaboration among researchers, policy makers, practitioners and communities to help inform better policies, practices and decision making. "It's particularly designed to support community-level organisations, community sector organisations and local governments, who are all frontline practitioners, and give them access to the most up-to-date research and researchers,” she adds.
Lauren wants the CCE to underline the urgency of drawing our collective intelligence together to focus on climate change adaptation. ”The fact is: how systemic, fast and pervasive climate change impacts are, continues to shock even those of us who work on them,” she says. “The severity of situations we're dealing with are difficult for even the most open-ended worst-case scenario planning to incorporate, because it gets beyond what you can imagine until it happens.”
At the same time, innovative responses and collaboration are emerging in many quarters. “Adaptation is evolving rapidly and while some groups are yet to begin, some are already trialling what we could think of as second and third generation approaches – ones that are far more systemic and strategic”. Climate change impacts are as much caused by existing problems as climate-related stresses, and adaptation is an opportunity to deal with long-standing issues such as environmental degradation and injustice. “If we can keep adaptation focused on the public good, it can help generate the healthier natural and social systems we have known for eons that we ultimately need”.
For Lauren, focusing our collective intelligence on the issue is urgent. “I think that's the thing: we just really need to focus and I hope the CCE plays a part in that.”
To mark the relaunch of the Climate Change Exchange, Regen is inviting researchers, policy makers and practitioners to a conversation about where adaptation is at, how knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning can strengthen our collective capacity, and what role the CCE can play going forward. Head here to register for the online event before Thursday, September 4.