Up to 350 positions at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation will be made redundant, with its climate research divisions to bear the brunt of the job losses.

The chief executive of the national science agency, Larry Marshall, said the redundancies were in line with CSIRO’s 2020 strategy to increase collaboration with industry and boost commercialisation of science.

The former Silicon Valley entrepreneur told staff in an email obtained by Guardian Australia the agency’s research had pioneered climate models and honed their measurements “to prove climate change”.

“That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”

He said job losses were in line with the agency’s 2020 strategy to transform Australian businesses, particularly the resource industry, so they could compete in “a new and uncertain future”.

“Digital technology will disrupt every Australian industry and each part of our business must reinvent itself to help Australia respond to this global challenge,” he said.

“As our business unit leaders work through the process of realigning their teams for the new strategy it is inevitable that there will be job losses.”

The worst-affected areas would be the agency’s units on manufacturing, land and water, oceans and atmosphere, and its new “data innovation hub”, Data61, he said.

“Our headcount is projected to be unchanged at the end of a two year period, but it is anticipated there could be up to 175 less CSIRO people per year during this two year transition.”

A CSIRO spokesman, Huw Morgan, confirmed that staff were being told of the changes on Thursday.



He said the changes were part of a strategic shift in the organisation towards climate change “mitigation and adaptation [and] data collection and analysis, how we can use data in science and innovation”.

Andy Pitman, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, questioned whether the nature of climate change had been fully understood.

“[Questions about climate change have] been answered in the same way that Galileo answered the structure of the universe when he used the first telescope,” he said.

“We have considerable confidence in how average climate will change globally and to a degree over Australia. What we don’t know is how extremes will change, how cyclones will change in intensity, how much heat waves will intensify, which are exactly what you need to know in order to adapt.”



He said the cuts would diminish Australia’s understanding of its climate. “It will lead to Australia adapting to things that won’t happen, and not adapting to things that will happen, with a much higher probability,” he said.

Pitman said that over time, a partnership between Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and the university sector had built a collaboration that had the capacity to guide adaptation to climate change. “That partnership is breaking up and I think that is going to be to the deep regret of governments in the future.”

CSIRO’s oceans and atmosphere flagship is a world leader on many aspects of climate science. Its staff include scientists such as Pep Cannedel, who leads the global carbon project, a major international project that tracks the carbon cycle, identifying out where carbon is produced and where it goes.

It also includes scientists such as Wenju Cai, who is among the world’s leading experts on the interaction between oceans and the atmosphere. His work has uncovered, among other things, the nature of El Niño, a climate phenomenon that redistributes rainfall around the globe.

The head of the CSIRO staff association, Sam Popovski, said he was “bewildered” by job losses “in these fundamental landmark areas of science that CSIRO’s had a world-leading reputation in”.

“The new CEO has obviously come in and developed a new strategy, which is moving the organisation towards a more commercial and digital technology focus,” he said.

“On its own, that’s not an issue, but to do that while also throwing away a lot of research that’s in the public interest seems a retrograde step.”

He said staff were sceptical that “any assurances about job numbers two years out will come to fruition”, he said.

Successive federal funding cuts, including a $115m reduction in the 2014 federal budget, have seen the agency’s staffing levels shrink by 20% in the past years, equal to around 1,400 jobs.



Guardian Australia revealed in November 2014 that science and research roles were hit hardest by the cuts.



A senior climate researcher at CSIRO told Guardian Australia that staff were “completely in the dark” about the cuts and have been getting their information from the media.