Professor Bill Bellotti

Professor Bill Bellotti is an agronomist who holds the Vincent Fairfax Chair in Sustainable Agricultural and Rural Development in the UWS School of Natural Sciences.

Professor Bill Bellotti: Climate Change - Global population growth and rising living standards

Professor Bellotti says Australia is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change.

Professor Bellotti believes government policies such as carbon pollution reduction schemes will have an impact on Australian agricultural by driving up costs, but the long term and greater impact will be from reduced rainfall and increased temperatures from climate change.

He says climate change is the biggest challenge facing agriculture since it was introduced in Australia and it will have a huge impact on food security locally and internationally.

The next few decades will be a ‘bottleneck’ as global population growth and rising living standards increase the demand for food, water and resources while climate change will make it more difficult to produce food.

Professor Bellotti believes a key solution is higher food production efficiencies perhaps by using more greenhouses to grow crops and through training more agricultural researchers who have the skills to find the technological solutions the world will need.