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Those fearing that the Albanese government would water down the threat of global warming in its long-awaited Climate Risk Assessment report should be reassured.
The report, published on Monday morning, makes for horrifying reading.
The clock is ticking on Australia’s climate change response.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
It paints a picture of a nation facing escalating climate risks that have already been realised and that will be felt by every Australian, particularly those living on the outskirts of major cities or in the far north.
“No Australian community will be immune from climate risks that will be cascading, compounding and concurrent,” Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said during a press conference after the report’s release.
“It’s important that we don’t gild the lily or downplay its impacts in any way. We have to be honest to the Australian people.”
The report used 1.2 degrees of warming as a baseline, though most scientists now agree that Australia has already warmed by 1.5 degrees since the industrial period due to greenhouse gas emissions.
It then charted potential impacts at 1.5 degrees, two degrees and three degrees should substantial action not be taken to mitigate warming or adapt to it.
The assessment finds that a three-degree increase in average temperatures would result in a 444 per cent increase in heat-related deaths in Sydney, 423 per cent in Darwin and 250 per cent in Melbourne.
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If populations remain as they are today, more than 1.5 million people will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding risks by 2050, with sea waters inundating coastal infrastructure, homes and drinking water supplies, the report says.
It foreshadowed losses on property values of $611 billion by 2050 and warned of a risk to the financial system itself.
The political implications of the report are clear.
It sets the government up to defend the 2035 emissions reduction target, which is expected to be released this week, from criticism that it is too high and will cost too much.
“[The report] makes clear that the cost of action is smaller than the cost of inaction under any scenario,” Bowen said.
But perhaps more importantly, it shifts the national climate debate from one about potential future risk to one about a response to an immediate and tangible threat.
Those who argue against action can now more reasonably be asked what measures they would take, or to make their case for not acting at all.
But it will not inoculate the government from criticism that it is not acting ambitiously enough, or that it is hypocritical for it to back Australia’s fossil fuel export industry while seeking to cut its domestic emissions.
As Bowen spoke, it had been just three days since his colleague, Environment Minister Murray Watt, gave final approval for Woodside Energy to extend the life of its vast North West Shelf gas project by 40 years, a decision likely to release an extra 4 to 6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Asked what emission reduction target Australia should be announcing in light of the report, Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said grimly that “the tension between what is necessary and what is possible” was growing.
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A scientific analysis commissioned by the council says Australia has already missed the boat on a reduction target in line with 1.5 degrees, and that to be in line with two degrees of warming, Australia would need to adopt a target of net zero by 2035.
Given the economic and political reality, she said a minimum of 75 per cent would be achievable and “the minimum number for a credible target”. That number now seems unlikely as a minimum.
One argument we can expect to hear this week is that nothing Australia does alone can change the climate. This wilfully misses the point, according to Bill Hare, the physicist and climate scientist who heads the think tank Climate Analytics.
Countries can slow warming only by working together and can only urge greater action by one another by adopting their own ambitious targets.
When the Paris Agreement was adopted, the world was on track for an average of between 3.5 and four degrees of warming under current policies. Now we are on track for 2.7 to three degrees, Hare says, noting that Australia will warm significantly more than that average due to the size of its land mass.
He says the risk assessment shows more clearly what scientists already knew: that Australia has more to lose than most countries from climate change, and more to gain in leading the effort against it.
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