That's the sobering news delivered by CSIRO at a special forum in Sydney today, when it outlined its latest research on the risks that climate change poses to agriculture, and potential adaptation strategies, at a special forum hosted by the Australian Council of Agricultural Journalists.

Dr Mark Howden, whose research has focused on climate change adaptation, said carbon dioxide emissions, global temperature rises and sea level rises are meeting - or exceeding - the worst-case scenarios plotted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change in the 1990s.

While it remains an open question as to whether the climatic changes being experienced in Australia—such as the declining rainfall across the continent's lower half—can be atttributed to global warming, Dr Howden said the fact remains that many of the changes being recorded around the globe are consistent with the modelling of the potential effects of global warming.

In its latest research, CSIRO decided to move away from largely meaningless forecasts of temperature rises, and look at the risks to various forms of agriculture in different climatic regions.

"Agricultural industries that depend on irrigation water but which produce a relatively low-value product, like rice and dairy, are pretty vulnerable," Dr Howden said.

"There's also a fair degree of vulnerability for cereal cropping in marginal areas—that's only going to get more marginal."

Across the southern regions, Dr Howden forecast the possibility that less reliable rainfall would see more emphasis on livestock production, with cropping seen more as an opportunity enterprise rather than an annual certainty.

Coastal horticultural crops in the north, and sugar, are likely to be exposed to a greater risk of damage from storms, cyclones and even sea level rise.

The good news, Dr Howden said, is that Australian agriculture is already used to coping with adversity and climate risk; and that the nation has a strong underlying research base.

The bad news is that Australia has been politically slow to accept the threat of climate change, "putting us a decade behind where we could be".