Much of South Australian agricultural production comes from a relatively narrow strip of land between the ocean and a large inland dessert. The medium to low rainfall zone in South Australia covers a spectrum from intensive cropping with a high frequency of relatively high risk and high return crops such as canola and pulses to a primarily grazing enterprise with opportunity cropping. Likewise the wine industry is conscious of differences in temperature between regions such as Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Barossa, Clare, Adelaide Hills and the Riverland.

Climate is a major (but not exclusive) determinant of our current understanding of place and purpose; it follows that changes in climate will require adjustments in how we perceive and use landscapes. Impacts of climate change will be experienced and managed at the local scale while most global climate models have a relatively coarse spatial resolution of 100 to 400 km.

In this paper we discuss the question of spatial and temporal scale when considering impacts and adaptation to climate change in the wine and grains industry in South Australia. We raise the problem of ‘artificial’ resolution or empty magnification of coarse climate change model data in the process of understanding the impact of climate change, but also address the challenges of aggregation from the fine scale (field and farm) to coarser (regional) scales in studying adaptation to climate change.