What is climate change?

Climate change in Australia refers to the long-term warming of the country's land and oceans, caused mainly by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and from land clearing. The continent has already warmed by about 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1910, according to the joint State of the Climate report from the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, and warming is continuing at about 0.2 degrees per decade.

The observed effects of climate change in Australia are wide-ranging. Mean rainfall has declined across south-eastern and south-western Australia since the mid-twentieth century, with the south-west experiencing particularly dry winters since the 1970s. Heatwave frequency, intensity, and duration have increased across most of the country. Marine heatwaves have caused mass coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Bushfire weather has worsened, contributing to events like the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer fires that burned 18.6 million hectares.

Australia has had a complex policy history on climate change. The Howard Coalition government refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, while the Rudd Labor government ratified it in December 2007 as its first act in office. The Gillard government's Clean Energy Act 2011 introduced a carbon price that operated from July 2012 to July 2014 before being repealed by the Abbott government. The Paris Agreement was ratified by the Turnbull government in 2016. The Albanese Labor government's Climate Change Act 2022 set the current legally binding emissions targets.

The country's economic structure makes the transition particularly challenging. Australia is the world's second-largest exporter of coal and the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and these exports fund a substantial share of national wealth. The transition to renewable energy, the closure of coal-fired power stations (Liddell closed 2023, Eraring scheduled 2025, Yallourn 2028), and the development of the country's vast critical minerals reserves (lithium, rare earths, copper) sit at the heart of current economic and political debate.