Climatic hazards and their mitigation

Abstract

In his famous Australian bush ballad, Said Hanrahan (Stewart and Keesing, 1968), PJ Hartigan vividly portrays the climatic hazards which face many Australian rural communities. Droughts, floods and bushfires form a cyclic trilogy of natural hazards that have helped shape the Australian character - and the image of Australia as any older New Zealander brought up on a weekly diet of Dad and Dave on the wireless will testify. The history of the Australian outback is the his- By contrast New Zealand is a lucky country. In explaining the importance of climate in agriculture a pupil of Aristotle is reported as saying that it is the year which bears the fruit not the field (Bourke, 1984). Nowhere has this been better illustrated than in New Zealand where a benign climate has been and still is the country's greatest resource, and is the primary reason for its continuing pros- perity relative to most other countries of the world.