As raging bushfires tore through Queensland's Granite Belt in 2019, Mike Hayes could do little but watch as crops at his beloved vineyards were ruined by smoke.
Smoke taint is disastrous for a vintage, if not immediately evident, he explains: "Once you put it in a bottle, about eight months later it tastes like the smell of an ashtray."
The winemaker from the southern Queensland region that borders New South Wales has been working in vineyards all his life.
In just three years since the bushfires he's also lived through drought and flood – not to mention wild storms and extreme temperatures. It's what he calls "explosive weather conditions".
"I remember in the drought, I was travelling to work and I just wouldn't even look at the bush," Mr Hayes said.
"It was hard to accept the fact that you're just seeing the whole bush die around you."
While natural disasters can wreak havoc, Mr Hayes said longer-term effects of climate change – delayed frosts, hotter summer nights and wilder, more frequent storms – were having the greatest impact.
Tired of seeing his work suffer, he's taking action. And he says it's time people throughout regional Australia did too.
"I strongly believe we have to change as farmers," he says.
"All the old farming practices which were quite common and passed on for 100 years, they'll have to change."
Now a consultant for several wineries in the region, Mr Hayes is exploring new ways of growing grapes, as well as testing to determine the most resilient varieties to deal with changing climates.
This includes moving from French varieties to some Italian vines with buds that bloom outside the spring-summer storm season.
"We're looking at all these varieties that are coming through now — the gorgeous Italian varieties like fiano, which is very similar to chardonnay and comes from central Italy, vermentino which is an Italian version of sauvignon blanc, montepulciano, it's a bit merlot-like," he said.
"So it's not as if we lose the styles completely, we're just changing our goal posts."
Mr Hayes said the traditional way of planting vines — with a northeasterly aspect — was also changing as farmers opted for southern-facing slopes to better cope with "the harsh baking sun".
Climate change can impact all sectors
According to climate change experts, this type of adaptation is the key to building resilience.
Lauren Rickards is the co-leader of the Climate Change Transformations research program at RMIT University in Melbourne.
She said climate change had the ability to impact all sectors of regional Australian economies and communities, from agriculture to tourism, health and population sizes.
"Climate variability in and of itself, as we know, is becoming more extreme," Professor Rickards said.
"You just need to look at the ongoing flooding, if not the Black Summer fires.
"When you put [that and rising temperatures] together … the flow-on effects are … becoming so severe that we're actually really starting to struggle to keep up with them."
While urban areas are not immune to climate change – especially with coastal erosion and fiercer storms – it has the potential to widen the socio-cultural divide that exists between regional areas and cities.
Professor Rickards said adapting to climate change was not only about responding to the immediate challenges of greenhouse gas emissions but other inequalities, including access to services and reliable infrastructure.
"In a lot of ways, regional areas are advantaged because they have the capabilities, the skills, the motivation, and social relationships that cities could only dream of," she said.
"But at the same time, things such as the capacity to rebuild in a timely manner … the capacity to access the sorts of health services that you might need … existing inequalities can be deepened."
What do we need for a good life?
Amanda Cahill, who heads consultancy The Next Economy, works with coal mining and fossil fuel-reliant regions across the country to help them transition their economies to greener sources.
Dr Cahill says adaptation and transition require an entire rethink of how regional societies operate.
"It's about [asking] what do we need to build a lot more resilience into the system," she said.
"That's everything from questioning how insurance works, to looking at how we build our households in areas that are prone to coastal erosion.
"[It's about using] this opportunity to make sure that we're investing in regions so they have the health care and education services and all the things that people need to have a good life."
How communities are changing
Across regional Australia, communities and regions are banding together to adapt the way things operate.
At a local level, the Townsville City Council has called for councils to have more powers to block some developments in high-risk flood zones, while the Gladstone Regional Council has recently released a roadmap with The Next Economy to help guide that region's economic transition.
The Local Government Association of Queensland also has a Climate Resilient Councils group that helps councils plan for, and respond to, the challenges and opportunities arising from climate change.
Professor Rickards said it was important that leadership came from rural and regional areas.
"Without doubt, local government needs to be part of it and there's some great leadership emerging there, but at the same time they've got a lot on their plate, including picking up the pieces after climate-related disaster after climate-related disaster," she said.
Professor Rickards said other community groups, the private sector and state and federal governments also had important roles to play.
Ultimately, she said both adaptation to climate change, and investments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, could bring huge opportunities to regional areas.
"…In terms of new industries, innovations, new skills, capabilities, and families into rural and regional areas… benefits upon benefits," she said.
More investment to manage change
But Dr Cahill said more investment was needed in regional areas to ensure that change, especially in regions reliant on sectors like coal mining, was managed well.
"There is opportunity, especially with all of the other industries that can be built with renewable energy," she said.
"But the question I have is: How are we going to manage this change?
"This is going to require much more intervention in terms of public investment in infrastructure, in services, in workforce training, in making sure that people are looked after as things change."
Back on the Granite Belt, Mike Hayes is also busy with the Queensland College of Wine Tourism vineyard of the future program.
"It gives us the ability to look into the future a bit and seeing what varieties can handle climate change going forward," he said.
"This thing called climate change … it's about time we all stood up and had a real strong look at it and adapt and adopt.
"So we adopt new techniques and adapt to the future."
This is the first in a series of articles by ABC regional Queensland teams exploring the impacts and opportunities of climate change in their communities.
