About the Sharing Knowledge project

The project focuses on the impacts and adaptation strategies for Indigenous Australian communities living in northern Australia. Here you can find information on climate change projections for regional areas in the north as well as suggested direct and indirect impacts that may occur as a result.

Working with Indigenous communities the aim is to encourage a better understanding of climate change impacts on their communities and to determine the best ways to mitigate or reduce these detrimental impacts on their way of life.

Furthermore by acquiring a greater understanding of the traditional environmental knowledge that has accumulated over thousands of years such knowledge can be integrated with modern environmental and climate science and applied in a broader sense for the wider Australian community.

The inital research was supported by CSIRO, Marine and Atmospheric Research. It is currently supported by the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales.

Climate change in Northern Australia

Climate change projections for northern Australia include higher temperatures, more extreme rainfall, sea-level rise and potentially more intense cyclones within the next 50 years. Consequently, long sections of coastline, river systems, wetland areas and off-shore islands will be susceptible to erosion and saltwater inundation, while inland areas are likely to have more bushfires, dust storms, extremes in temperatures, flooding and droughts.

Many of these biophysical impacts have direct and indirect effects on the health and well-being of people living in affected regions, especially those who are sensitive to environmental change and who, for various reasons, have a low capacity to adapt.