Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead - Guardian Editorial

The Guardian Newspaper  -  Editorial

The president’s destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires,
while Beijing has bet big on the green transition

‘It is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. 

The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.

Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. 

Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US .

The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. 

The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.

In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. 

China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.

The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis , says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. 

The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. 

The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.

There are other grave concerns, including evidence of the use of forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in solar-panel production in Xinjiang. 

China’s chokehold on critical minerals hampers the ability of others to develop their own technology. And while its cheap renewables technology has resulted in the cheapest electricity in history, it has also hit manufacturers in other countries.

No one can compensate for the grim reversal of belated US action on emissions. There is also a vacuum in climate diplomacy that China shows no signs of filling. But Beijing has a vested interest in encouraging others to cut emissions, even if some nations now want to challenge its “green mercantilism”. 

 In contrast, US billionaires look forward to prospering at the cost of wallets and lives – not only at home, but around the world. 

Links

• 2025 in Review: Billion-Dollar Disasters and Climate Extremes – Climate Central
• ‘Point of no return’: Scientists warn Earth is nearing climate tipping points – The Guardian
• Trump EPA moves to scrap Obama-era endangerment finding – The Guardian
• Climate action now widely accepted among US politicians – The Guardian
• Trump’s anti-climate agenda would leave Americans poorer, report finds – The Guardian
• ‘Corruption, plain and simple’: Democrats condemn EPA rollback – The Guardian
• Trump asked oil executives for $1bn in campaign donations, sources say – The Washington Post
• Analysis: China’s CO₂ emissions have now been flat or falling for 21 months – Carbon Brief
• Analysis: China’s emissions have now caused more global warming than the EU – Carbon Brief
• Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA – Carbon Brief

A World on Fire: The Worldwide Consequences of Climate Change - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

As scientific indicators break records and human costs mount, 
the gap between what is happening and what is being done
grows ever harder to justify.

Key Points

2024 became the first calendar year to exceed 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, signalling the world is at the threshold of the Paris Agreement's most ambitious target. [1] Ocean heat content, sea-level rise, glacier mass loss, and Arctic sea-ice decline are all accelerating, threatening the stability of Earth's major physical systems. [2] The poorest and least-emitting nations, particularly small island states and sub-Saharan Africa, bear the heaviest climate burdens, driving urgent demands for loss and damage finance. [3] Compound climate events, combining heatwaves, wildfires, floods and disease outbreaks, are reshaping global risk faster than most institutions can adapt. [4] Critical ecosystems including coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest are approaching or crossing tipping points that could trigger cascading, irreversible change. [5] Current national climate plans remain far short of the action required to limit warming, with implementation gaps widening even as impacts intensify. [6]

A Threshold Crossed

In early 2025, the World Meteorological Organisation confirmed what scientists had long feared: 2024 was the first calendar year on record in which global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.^[1]

That figure, enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement as the upper limit of the safer warming corridor, has functioned for a decade as the aspirational ceiling of international climate ambition.

Its breach, even if temporary and driven partly by a strong El Niño event, has sharpened debate among scientists about whether the world is entering a phase of sustained overshoot, a period in which temperatures remain above 1.5°C for years or decades before being drawn back down, if ever, through large-scale carbon removal.

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, completed in 2023, concluded that without immediate and deep emissions reductions, the world is on track to reach 1.5°C of permanent warming sometime in the early 2030s.^[7]

The consequences differ sharply by region: tropical zones face more intense droughts and crop failures, low-lying coastlines confront accelerating inundation, and the polar regions continue to warm at roughly four times the global average rate.

For communities already living at the edge of what is survivable, the distinction between a temporary and a permanent overshoot is academic.

Indicators Racing Ahead

Of all the physical indicators scientists track, ocean heat content has proven the most relentless.

The WMO's State of the Global Climate 2024 report recorded new highs in ocean heat content for the third consecutive year, with the top 2,000 metres of the world's oceans absorbing energy at an unprecedented rate.^[2]

Global mean sea level rose by approximately 4.5 millimetres per year between 2013 and 2022, more than double the rate measured in the 1990s, driven by both ice melt and thermal expansion of warming ocean water.

Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice mass at accelerating rates, and a 2023 study published in Nature Climate Change found that melting from the Antarctic Ice Sheet alone has locked in at least 27 centimetres of eventual sea-level rise, regardless of future emissions cuts.^[8]

Arctic sea ice in 2023 reached its lowest annual maximum extent on record, while boreal and tropical glacier systems from the Andes to the Himalayas continue shrinking at rates that threaten the freshwater supply of hundreds of millions of people.

These indicators collectively point toward Earth system instability, a condition in which multiple interlocking systems shift simultaneously and push each other further from their historical equilibria.

Locked-In Change and the Limits of Planning

Some of what is coming cannot now be prevented, only managed.

Scientists refer to "committed warming," the additional temperature rise already guaranteed by greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, as well as "committed sea-level rise," the eventual inundation that will result from ice sheets already destabilised even if emissions stopped today.

The most recent IPCC projections suggest global sea levels will rise by between 0.3 and 1 metre by 2100 under moderate emissions scenarios, with the possibility of higher rises if ice sheet dynamics accelerate beyond current models.

Policymakers in coastal cities from Jakarta to Miami are beginning to factor in these inevitabilities, with some jurisdictions moving infrastructure inland, raising building standards, and in some cases planning managed retreat from vulnerable areas.

The Netherlands, which has lived below sea level for centuries, has invested heavily in adaptive infrastructure, but experts note that the scale and speed of future rise may outpace even the most ambitious engineering solutions.^[9]

In Australia, the Productivity Commission and state planning agencies have begun incorporating sea-level scenarios into coastal development guidelines, though critics argue the timelines used remain too conservative.

Compound Events and Cascading Crises

The single-disaster model that once defined emergency management has become dangerously inadequate.

Climate scientists now speak of "compound events," instances in which two or more extreme conditions strike simultaneously or in rapid succession, multiplying harm beyond what any single event would cause.

In 2022, Pakistan experienced simultaneous heatwaves and record monsoon flooding, killing more than 1,700 people, displacing 33 million and wiping out roughly 10 per cent of the country's GDP.^[10]

In southern Europe, overlapping heatwaves and droughts in 2023 contributed to wildfire seasons of extraordinary destructiveness, with Greece alone losing more than 96,000 hectares of forest in a single summer.

Health systems face cascading demands: a flood event generates drowning deaths, then waterborne disease outbreaks, then vector-borne disease surges as standing water breeds mosquitoes, then long-term mental health crises among displaced populations.

These sequences are now occurring faster than humanitarian systems can reset between events, creating what some researchers describe as a "chronic emergency" condition in the world's most vulnerable regions.

Science Confirmed, and Surpassed

The past three years have not merely confirmed earlier scientific projections about climate impacts. In several critical areas, they have exceeded them.

The extraordinary 2023 spike in sea surface temperatures, which exceeded previous records by an anomalous margin, surprised even senior climate scientists and triggered urgent investigations into possible changes in Earth's energy balance.^[11]

Antarctic sea ice in 2023 finished the year at a level roughly one million square kilometres below any previously recorded winter maximum, a deviation so large that scientists described it as "statistically mind-boggling."

Extreme rainfall events have become more intense more quickly than many models predicted, consistent with basic physics, since warmer air holds more moisture, but the pace has accelerated faster than projected scenarios suggested.

At the same time, the toll of extreme heat on human health has confirmed projections from heat mortality studies: Europe's 2022 summer heat killed an estimated 61,000 people, a figure that aligns with and in some countries exceeds prior modelled estimates.^[12]

A Crisis of Health

Climate change is reshaping the geography of human disease.

The range of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes has expanded upward in altitude and poleward in latitude as warming renders previously inhospitable regions suitable for breeding.^[13]

Dengue fever, once confined to tropical zones, has established itself in southern Europe and parts of the continental United States, with 2023 recording the highest global dengue caseload ever reported.

Heat-related deaths, particularly among the elderly, outdoor workers and urban populations without access to cooling, are rising steadily, with the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change estimating that heat-related mortality among people over 65 increased by 85 per cent between 2000 and 2022.^[14]

Undernutrition is worsening in climate-exposed agricultural regions: the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that climate shocks cost low- and middle-income countries hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural losses annually, with direct effects on child stunting and maternal health.

Mental health consequences, including climate anxiety, post-disaster trauma and grief over environmental loss, are increasingly documented but remain poorly resourced in both rich and poor countries.

Humanitarian Systems Under Pressure

International humanitarian agencies, including the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, have documented a marked increase in climate-related emergency responses over the past decade.

Extreme weather events now account for more than 80 per cent of all humanitarian crises tracked globally, and the financial requirements of those responses consistently outpace available funding.^[15]

Forecast-based financing, a model in which aid is released automatically when weather forecasts reach pre-agreed thresholds, has shown promise in countries including Bangladesh and Ethiopia, allowing communities to take protective action before a disaster strikes rather than waiting for relief after the fact.

Early warning systems have demonstrably saved lives: the 2023 cyclone Mocha in Myanmar and Bangladesh was tracked well in advance, allowing mass evacuations that kept the death toll far below historical equivalents, though coverage gaps in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia remain severe.

The Cost in Lives and Dollars

Projections of climate-related mortality through to 2050 carry wide confidence intervals but point in a consistent direction.

A 2021 analysis by McKinsey Global Institute estimated that under a high-emissions scenario, annual heat-related mortality could increase by 73 deaths per 100,000 people in the most affected regions of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa by mid-century.^[16]

Economic health costs, encompassing lost labour productivity, increased healthcare demand and reduced cognitive performance from heat exposure, are projected to reach trillions of dollars annually at the global scale.

Researchers acknowledge significant uncertainty in these figures, since they depend on emissions trajectories, adaptation investments and the pace of warming, but the directional conclusion, that inaction is far costlier than action, is robust across most modelling approaches.

Health Systems Stretched

The hospitals and clinics of low- and middle-income countries were already under strain before climate change intensified.

In the Sahel region of Africa, health facilities are regularly disrupted by flooding, extreme heat and the displacement of populations fleeing drought, compounding their capacity to manage existing burdens of disease.

Bangladesh has developed one of the world's most sophisticated community health worker networks for climate-related illness, including cyclone preparedness protocols embedded into primary care, offering a model that other vulnerable nations are beginning to replicate.

The WHO's 2023 health and climate change country profiles documented that fewer than half of national health systems in the world have climate change adaptation plans in place, and that funding for health adaptation remains a small fraction of what is needed.^[17]

Food, Water and Displacement

In the Horn of Africa, four consecutive failed rainy seasons between 2020 and 2022 drove the worst drought in 40 years, pushing more than 22 million people into acute food insecurity and displacing millions across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.^[18]

Climate change did not cause the drought alone, but attribution science, the discipline that estimates how much climate change altered the probability and severity of specific events, found it made such droughts significantly more likely.

Himalayan glacier retreat is reducing dry-season river flows across South and Central Asia, threatening irrigation systems that support hundreds of millions of farmers.

The World Bank projects that without significant adaptation investment, climate change could force more than 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, with the largest movements in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.^[19]

An Unequal Burden

The injustice at the heart of the climate crisis is, by now, well established in the scientific literature, even if it remains imperfectly addressed in policy.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Pacific emit a fraction of global greenhouse gases yet suffer some of the most severe impacts, measured in lives lost, economic damage as a share of GDP and loss of culturally and ecologically significant places.

A 2023 study in Nature Sustainability found that the economic damages attributable to climate change over the past several decades have disproportionately fallen on nations with the lowest historical emissions, effectively constituting a large-scale transfer of wealth from poor to rich countries through climatic harm.^[20]

Indigenous communities on every continent face simultaneous threats to their lands, livelihoods and cultural practices from climate impacts, with their prior knowledge of ecosystems and seasonal patterns increasingly disrupted by conditions outside any living memory.

Intersecting Inequalities

Climate change does not affect everyone within a country equally.

Women and girls in agricultural societies bear disproportionate burdens when harvests fail or water sources move further away, since they typically carry primary responsibility for food preparation, water collection and childcare in crisis conditions.

Older people and people with disabilities face heightened mortality risk during heatwaves, floods and displacement events, often because evacuation systems are designed for the mobile and the digitally connected.

Adaptation strategies that embed gender-responsive and disability-inclusive design, from early warning systems delivered via community radio to emergency shelters with accessible facilities, consistently achieve better outcomes, though they remain the exception rather than the norm.

Loss, Damage, and the Finance Gap

The establishment of a dedicated Loss and Damage Fund at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 was hailed as a historic breakthrough for climate justice, but the initial pledges of around US$700 million were widely considered a fraction of what is required.^[3]

Estimates of annual loss and damage costs in developing countries already run to hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections suggesting they could reach one to two trillion dollars annually by mid-century under moderate warming scenarios.

The architecture of the fund, including which countries can access it, how claims are assessed and who ultimately controls disbursement, remains contested, with vulnerable nations pushing for direct access and accountability mechanisms that do not replicate the slow bureaucracies of existing climate finance channels.

Islands on the Edge

For small island developing states, the climate crisis is not a future scenario but a present reality.

In Tuvalu, the government has negotiated an unprecedented agreement with Australia that provides its citizens with pathways to migrate as their homeland becomes uninhabitable, while legally preserving the nation's sovereignty even if its physical territory disappears beneath the waves.^[21]

The Maldives, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands are each developing different strategies, balancing land reclamation, managed migration and diplomatic advocacy for stronger global emissions commitments.

These nations have emerged as some of the most effective voices at UN climate negotiations, consistently pressing for ambition that matches the scientific evidence rather than the political convenience of major emitters.

Voices at the Negotiating Table

The Alliance of Small Island States and the Climate Vulnerable Forum have played an outsized role in shaping climate diplomacy relative to their economic and political weight.

At COP28, their advocacy contributed to the historic agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, the first time a COP decision had explicitly named fossil fuels as the source of the problem, though critics noted the language fell short of the binding phase-out commitments that science demands.^[22]

The next round of national climate plans, due under the Paris Agreement by 2025, will test whether the political commitments made at successive COPs translate into policies with genuine teeth.

Reefs and Forests at the Brink

The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system and one of Australia's most significant natural and economic assets, experienced its most widespread mass bleaching event on record in 2024, with surveys finding bleaching across more than 73 per cent of individual reefs assessed.^[5]

Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures rise above the threshold that the symbiotic algae living within coral tissue can tolerate; the algae are expelled, turning the coral white and leaving it vulnerable to starvation and disease.

In the Amazon, more than a decade of deforestation combined with intensifying drought has pushed significant portions of the eastern and southern basin toward a dieback threshold, beyond which the forest can no longer generate enough of its own rainfall to sustain itself.

A 2022 study in Nature Climate Change found that 75 per cent of the Amazon showed signs of losing resilience over the preceding two decades, indicating a trend toward a drier, more savanna-like ecosystem.^[23]

The Ocean's Hidden Crisis

Beneath the surface, ocean acidification, caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide into seawater, is altering the chemistry of marine environments at a rate not seen in at least 300 million years.

Shellfish, crustaceans and the microscopic organisms that underpin marine food webs face increasing difficulty building and maintaining their calcium carbonate structures in more acidic water.

Commercial fisheries in the North Pacific are already reporting declines in shellfish populations linked to acidification, and projections suggest that by mid-century, large portions of the Southern Ocean will be chemically corrosive to certain shell-forming organisms, with cascading effects throughout the food chain.^[24]

Glaciers and the Water Tower Crisis

The term "water towers" describes mountain ranges whose glaciers store freshwater that feeds rivers during dry seasons, providing reliable irrigation and drinking water to lowland populations.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya, the Alps, the Andes and the ranges of Central Asia are all losing ice at accelerating rates, with the WMO reporting that 2022 was the worst year for glacier mass loss in the Alps on record.^[2]

As glaciers shrink, they initially produce more meltwater, a temporary boost that masks the coming decline; when the ice runs out, rivers will run low or dry in the seasons when farmers and cities most need them.

The AMOC: A Sleeping Giant

Among the most consequential and least certain risks in the climate system is the possible weakening or collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the vast ocean conveyor that moves warm water northward into the North Atlantic and returns cold water southward at depth.

A 2023 study in Nature Communications suggested that the AMOC may be approaching a tipping point that could trigger a rapid and potentially irreversible slowdown within this century, though the finding remains contested among oceanographers, with some arguing the methodology overstates the certainty of the conclusion.^[25]

A substantial AMOC weakening would cool northwest Europe, intensify sea-level rise along the eastern seaboard of North America, disrupt monsoon systems across Africa and Asia, and dramatically alter the distribution of marine productivity in the Atlantic.

Nature's Defenders

Against the scale of these threats, ecologists are developing a portfolio of tools for preserving biodiversity under continued warming.

Assisted migration, the deliberate movement of species toward more suitable climatic conditions, has been piloted successfully with some tree species in North America and Australia, though it raises significant ecological and ethical questions about which species to prioritise and who decides.

Habitat connectivity, protecting and restoring wildlife corridors that allow species to move in response to shifting conditions, is widely regarded as among the most cost-effective biodiversity adaptation investments, and is increasingly embedded in national biodiversity strategies following the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022.

Economic Shockwaves

Climate shocks are becoming a structural economic force, not merely a series of one-off disasters.

The World Bank has documented how repeated extreme events are undermining debt sustainability in climate-vulnerable developing countries, with relief borrowing after disasters compounding existing fiscal pressures and reducing the funds available for adaptation investment.

Food price inflation, driven partly by climate-related harvest failures, is a consistent feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the 2020s, contributing to social unrest in countries from West Africa to South America where households spend a large proportion of their income on food.^[26]

Sectors Under Siege

Insurance is among the sectors experiencing the most acute financial stress from climate change.

In Australia, some insurers have withdrawn from markets covering cyclone-prone regions of Queensland and flood-risk zones in New South Wales, rendering properties effectively uninsurable and raising questions about the future of private markets in climate risk.

Agriculture faces input cost increases from water scarcity and crop failures, while the tourism industry is confronting existential questions about the viability of attractions, including coral reefs, alpine ski fields and low-lying tropical destinations, that depend on climatic conditions now in transition.

Infrastructure Under Threat

Power grids designed for historical temperature ranges are failing during extreme heat events, creating dangerous feedback loops in which the hottest days, when cooling is most needed, are precisely when electricity supply is most vulnerable.

Extreme rainfall is overwhelming stormwater infrastructure in cities from Sydney to Jakarta, while rising seas and storm surges are accelerating the deterioration of coastal roads, ports and flood barriers.

Governments including Australia's have begun incorporating climate risk into infrastructure standards and asset management frameworks, though the pace of upgrading existing infrastructure lags well behind the pace of changing conditions.^[27]

Displacement and Conflict

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported that weather-related disasters generated 26.4 million new internal displacements in 2023, the majority linked to storms and flooding.^[4]

Attribution of migration to climate change alone is methodologically complex, since people move for overlapping reasons, but a growing body of research documents that climate shocks significantly increase the probability of migration from agriculture-dependent communities, particularly when events destroy assets rather than merely disrupting income.

The Sahel, the Horn of Africa and low-lying coastal Bangladesh are among the regions where climate-related displacement is most systematically documented and where the interaction between climate stress, food insecurity and conflict risk is clearest.

Climate as a Security Threat

Defence establishments in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom have formally incorporated climate change into their strategic threat assessments, treating it as a "threat multiplier" that exacerbates fragility, resource competition and conflict risk in already unstable regions.^[28]

The Australian Defence Force has noted increased demands for disaster response domestically and in the Pacific, and the Department of Defence's 2023 climate change and national security risk assessment identified the Indo-Pacific as a region of particular concern given the combination of rapid warming, coastal exposure and governance challenges in many smaller island nations.

Warnings That Save Lives

The UN Secretary-General's Early Warnings for All initiative, launched in 2022, aims to ensure that every person on Earth has access to weather early warning systems by 2027, a goal motivated by the stark finding that countries without such systems suffer death tolls from comparable disasters up to eight times higher than those with them.^[29]

Progress has been made in South and Southeast Asia, where cyclone early warning networks have dramatically reduced mortality over three decades, but coverage remains patchy across sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Central America.

Cities Redesigning Themselves

Urban planners in heat-stressed cities including Athens, Medellín and Melbourne have begun designating "cooling centres," retrofitting green infrastructure and revising building codes to require better insulation and heat-reflective materials.

Rotterdam has invested heavily in water squares, urban parks designed to temporarily store floodwater during rain events before slowly releasing it into the drainage system, a nature-based solution now replicated in cities across Europe and Asia.

Australian jurisdictions are revising planning rules to reduce urban heat island effects through mandated tree canopy cover and restrictions on heat-absorbing dark surfaces in residential developments, though implementation is uneven across states and territories.

Communities Leading the Way

Some of the most robust climate adaptation has been driven not by governments but by communities acting on their own knowledge and circumstances.

Indigenous ranger programmes in northern Australia, which integrate traditional ecological knowledge with modern monitoring tools, have demonstrated measurable improvements in fire management, invasive species control and ecosystem resilience across vast areas of country.

In Fiji, village-level relocation processes guided by traditional governance structures have moved coastal communities to higher ground in ways that maintained social cohesion, offering a model of managed retreat that external planners have struggled to replicate through top-down processes.

The Promise Gap

The WMO and UNEP's 2024 Emissions Gap Report found that current national climate policies, even if fully implemented, would lead to roughly 3°C of warming by 2100, roughly double the Paris Agreement's upper limit.^[6]

The gap between the ambition expressed in national plans and the policies actually in place is itself significant: many countries have committed to targets without enacting the legislation, regulations or spending needed to reach them.

The 2023 Global Stocktake, the Paris Agreement's mechanism for assessing collective progress, found that while renewable energy deployment was accelerating rapidly, fossil fuel production remained at levels inconsistent with 1.5°C scenarios and adaptation finance for the most vulnerable countries remained grossly inadequate.

Tracking the Real World

A new generation of monitoring tools is improving the ability of scientists and policymakers to observe climate impacts in near-real time.

Satellite-based methane monitoring now allows attribution of large emission events to specific facilities within days of their occurrence, strengthening accountability for the oil and gas sector.

Machine learning systems trained on historical climate data can generate attribution analyses of extreme weather events within weeks of their occurrence, compressing a process that once took years and bringing scientific findings into the timeframe of public and political attention.^[30]

These tools will not, by themselves, close the gap between scientific knowledge and political action. But they are making it considerably harder to claim that the consequences of inaction are unknown.

What Is Still Possible

The accumulation of evidence reviewed here does not support complacency, but neither does it foreclose the possibility of meaningful action.

The world has already warmed to the point where some change is irreversible: glaciers will continue to retreat, seas will continue to rise, and communities already exposed to dangerous heat and flooding will face greater risk. No political agreement or technological breakthrough can undo that.

What remains within human agency is the scale of further warming and the investment in adaptation that can determine whether the most vulnerable communities have the resources to survive and rebuild.

Every fraction of a degree of warming avoided translates into real reductions in mortality, crop failure, displacement and ecosystem loss. Every dollar invested in early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure and loss and damage finance translates into lives preserved and futures kept open.

The science is no longer the uncertain variable. What remains uncertain is whether the political systems of a warming world will respond at the scale and speed that the evidence demands. The answer to that question will be the defining fact of this century, as consequential for future generations as any choice their predecessors have ever made.

References

1. World Meteorological Organisation, "2024 Confirmed as Warmest Year on Record at About 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Era", WMO, 2025.
2. World Meteorological Organisation, State of the Global Climate 2024, WMO, Geneva, 2025.
3. UNFCCC, "The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage", UNFCCC, 2024.
4. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2024, IDMC, Geneva, 2024.
5. Australian Institute of Marine Science, "Great Barrier Reef Condition Summary 2024", AIMS, 2024.
6. United Nations Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report 2024, UNEP, Nairobi, 2024.
7. IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report: Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, 2023.
8. DeConto, R. et al., "Future Antarctic Ice Loss and Sea Level Rise", Nature Climate Change, 2021.
9. Delta Programme, "Delta Programme: Working on the Delta", Government of the Netherlands, 2024.
10. UNDP, "Pakistan Floods 2022: Flash Appeal", United Nations Development Programme, 2022.
11. Cheng, L. et al., "Record-Breaking Ocean Warming in 2023", Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, 2024.
12. Ballester, J. et al., "Heat-Related Mortality in Europe During the Summer of 2022", Nature Medicine, 2023.
13. Ryan, S.J. et al., "Global Expansion of Dengue Risk Under Climate Change", The Lancet Planetary Health, 2022.
14. Romanello, M. et al., "The 2023 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change", The Lancet, 2023.
15. IFRC, World Disasters Report 2023, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva, 2023.
16. McKinsey Global Institute, "Climate Risk and Response: Physical Hazards and Socioeconomic Impacts", McKinsey & Company, 2020.
17. World Health Organisation, "Health and Climate Change Country Profiles 2023", WHO, Geneva, 2023.
18. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "Horn of Africa Drought Crisis", OCHA, 2022.
19. World Bank, "Climate Change Could Force 216 Million People to Migrate Within Their Own Countries by 2050", World Bank, 2021.
20. Bressler, R.D. et al., "Impacts of Climate Change Disproportionately Burden Low-Emitting Nations", Nature Sustainability, 2023.
21. Australian Government, "Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union", Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2023.
22. UNFCCC, "UAE Consensus: COP28 Decision", UNFCCC, Dubai, 2023.
23. Boulton, C.A. et al., "Pronounced Loss of Amazon Rainforest Resilience Since the Mid-2000s", Nature Climate Change, 2022.
24. CSIRO, "Ocean Acidification Research", CSIRO, 2023.
25. Ditlevsen, P. and Ditlevsen, S., "Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation", Nature Communications, 2023.
26. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2023, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome, 2023.
27. Infrastructure Australia, "Climate Change Risks to Australia's Infrastructure", Australian Government, 2022.
28. Australian Government Department of Defence, 2023 Defence Strategic Review, Commonwealth of Australia, 2023.
29. United Nations, "Early Warnings for All", UN Executive Action Plan, 2022.
30. World Weather Attribution, "Attribution Science: Linking Extreme Weather to Climate Change", worldweatherattribution.org, 2024.

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When the Smoke Settles: The Social Cost of Climate Change in Canberra - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

Renters, young people and outer-suburb residents face the greatest climate vulnerability in the ACT, with one in three Canberrans found to have low climate resilience. 1 During the 2019–20 Black Summer, Canberra's air quality exceeded hazardous limits on 42 days, driving an estimated 31 excess deaths and over 200 excess hospitalisations in the ACT. 2 Outer suburbs including Tuggeranong, outer Gungahlin and West Belconnen have less established tree cover, making them more exposed to urban heat as temperatures rise. 3 Climate change disproportionately harms people on low incomes, people with disability and First Nations peoples, according to ACT Council of Social Service. 4 With a 3°C rise, projections indicate up to 40 days per year above 35°C in Canberra, threatening outdoor workers, carers and community services. 5 A socially just climate adaptation strategy requires structural investment in social housing, energy efficiency and First Nations-led knowledge, not simply the resilience of individuals. 6

On New Year's Day 2020, the sky above Canberra turned the colour of rust.

Smoke from fires burning across southern New South Wales and in the ACT's own Namadgi National Park had settled over the city in an orange-brown pall.

For almost a month the air quality index at monitoring stations across the territory recorded levels far above what any public health standard was designed to accommodate.

At the Monash monitoring station in Tuggeranong, air pollution exceeded national health thresholds on 56 days that summer, 42 of them rated hazardous.²

To put that in proportion: fine particulate pollution reached roughly 25 times the hazardous threshold on 1 January 2020, a level comparable to the most polluted days in the world's most congested Asian megacities.

Canberrans who remember that summer describe the particular surreal horror of it: the eerie orange noon, the smell of burnt eucalyptus seeping through walls, the question of whether it was safe to take children to school, and the dawning realisation that there was, for many of them, nowhere to go.

That nowhere to go was not equally distributed.

Everyday Life, Equity and Vulnerability

Canberra is often described as a wealthy, well-educated city, and by aggregate measures it is.

In 2024 it was ranked the second-best city in the world for quality of life by the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index, drawing on indicators of health, education and income equality.⁷

That aggregate, however, conceals the texture of vulnerability that climate change reveals and deepens.

A major University of Canberra study surveying 2,671 residents found that one in three Canberrans has low climate change resilience, meaning they lack the financial resources, social networks or housing quality to safely weather heatwaves, smoke events or storms.¹

The study found that younger people, renters and residents of Gungahlin, a suburb of comparatively recent development with lower tree canopy density and higher proportions of renters, were among the most vulnerable.

Renters are placed in a structurally difficult position: they cannot retrofit insulation, install efficient air conditioning or plant shade trees without a landlord's permission, yet Canberra is already the second-most expensive city in Australia to rent in, tied with Sydney.⁸

For people on low incomes, the calculus of a smoke day is not simply one of comfort but of genuine risk.

With approximately 9 per cent of Canberrans living in poverty, primarily as a consequence of housing costs, the choice between running an air conditioner or paying for food is not a hypothetical.⁹

Older residents, particularly those living alone, face compounding risks during heatwaves: diminished physiological capacity to thermoregulate, limited mobility to reach cooling centres, and social isolation that means no one may check on them for days.

Students in share houses, many of them in energy-inefficient properties common in the inner north and inner south, similarly lack both the income and the lease security to demand improvements.

People with disability confront a further set of barriers: some medications increase heat sensitivity, many cannot easily access public transport to reach air-conditioned spaces, and those reliant on powered medical equipment face life-threatening risks during blackouts that can follow storm events.

The ACT Council of Social Service has stated plainly that climate change disproportionately harms people on low incomes, people with disability, people with chronic health conditions and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.⁴

These groups are also, not coincidentally, the groups most likely to be absent from formal climate adaptation consultation processes.

When government processes seek "community input" through online surveys, evening forums or written submissions, they structurally favour those with the time, digital access, language and civic confidence to participate, none of which are equally distributed.

Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing

The physical health toll of the 2019–20 Black Summer on Canberra has been documented with some precision.

Within the ACT, bushfire smoke was responsible for an estimated 31 excess deaths, over 200 excess hospitalisations for cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and 89 emergency department presentations for asthma during that season.²

A survey conducted in the immediate aftermath found that 97 per cent of people living in and around the ACT reported acute physical health effects from smoke, while 31 per cent said an existing health condition worsened and 16 per cent reported difficulty managing it.

Research by the Australian National University into community experiences of the smoke event found that the event was not merely a physical health crisis but a profound social and psychological one.

Residents described feelings of confinement, of anxiety about when the smoke would end, and of helplessness at not being able to protect their families.¹⁰

Those with young children or elderly relatives reported a particular burden of vigilance, constantly checking air quality apps, debating whether to keep children inside for another day, and managing the secondary stress of children unable to play outdoors for weeks at a time.

Mental health researchers have begun documenting what is sometimes called "eco-grief" or "climate anxiety", the sustained psychological distress that comes not only from acute disaster events but from anticipatory dread of a future understood to be more volatile than the past.

In a city where outdoor life, cycling to work, bush walking, visiting the lake shores, is central to many residents' sense of place and wellbeing, the loss of safe outdoor time to smoke or extreme heat represents a form of dispossession that is difficult to quantify but easy to feel.

For those without access to air conditioning at home, heatwaves are not a matter of inconvenience but of physical danger.

Australian public health research has found strong evidence of increasing hospitalisation risk during extreme heat for people with mental and behavioural disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease.¹¹

People experiencing homelessness are acutely exposed: without shelter that can be sealed against smoke, without air conditioning, and often without access to the information channels through which official warnings travel.

The ACT has Australia's highest rate of persistent homelessness, with 45 per cent of people who become homeless remaining so for at least seven months.¹²

Climate shocks that strain housing access, through storm damage, rent increases driven by reconstruction demand, or the loss of income from missed work, can push people into or deeper into housing insecurity, with cascading effects on mental health, family stability and community cohesion.

Housing, Neighbourhoods and Public Spaces

The capacity of a home to protect its occupants from heat and smoke is not a natural given, it is the product of decisions made during design and construction, decisions that in Canberra's rental market fall to landlords who bear none of the health costs of poorly insulated or ineffectively ventilated properties.

University of Canberra researchers found that the quality of homes protecting residents during extended heatwaves was one of the key weaknesses in Canberra's climate resilience profile.¹

The ACT Greens have identified outer suburbs as being most at risk as temperatures rise, specifically citing West Belconnen, lower Woden, outer Gungahlin and large parts of Tuggeranong as areas with less established tree cover and correspondingly greater heat exposure.³

These are also, in many cases, the suburbs with the highest proportions of public and social housing, lower-income households and newer, denser development.

The urban heat island effect, whereby built surfaces absorb and re-radiate heat, raising local temperatures above rural surroundings, is more pronounced in areas with extensive asphalt, minimal vegetation and poor air circulation.

The ACT Government's Living Infrastructure Plan sets a target of 30 per cent tree canopy cover in urban areas by 2045, but progress is uneven across the city and the decades-long lag between planting and canopy maturity means that today's new residents in outer suburbs will wait years before they experience meaningful shade.¹³

Public spaces that Canberrans have long regarded as central to the city's character, the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin, the network of cycle paths, the bush reserves at the urban fringe, are becoming less reliably accessible.

Smoke warnings restrict outdoor recreation across all socioeconomic groups, but those who can work from home, take their children to air-conditioned private play spaces or escape to climate-controlled gyms are insulated from the social costs in ways that shift workers, early childhood educators and outdoor hospitality workers are not.

There is also emerging evidence, consistent with international patterns, that climate pressures contribute to population movement, with some residents, particularly those with the means to do so, beginning to think about whether Canberra's climate trajectory is compatible with the life they want to live.

The communities most likely to leave are those most able to: professional, mobile households with portable work and financial savings.

Those who remain, in cheaper suburbs, in social housing, in long-established community networks, will inherit a city whose climate is changing and whose financial and social resources for adaptation are unequally spread.

Meanwhile, energy bills are rising as air conditioning shifts from a luxury to a medical necessity, and climate-driven insurance pressures are beginning to affect affordability across the ACT, particularly in bushfire-prone areas at the urban fringe.¹⁴

Community Cohesion, Culture and Identity

Disaster has a paradoxical social quality: it can both fracture communities and draw them together.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2019–20 fires and smoke, many Canberrans described a sharp intensification of neighbourly attention, checking on elderly neighbours, sharing information about air quality, organising informal support for those who could not easily manage alone.

The University of Canberra research noted, however, that access to strong social networks, among the most important resources for climate resilience, was lower in Canberra than access to financial resources, meaning that a significant number of residents did not have people they could reliably call on during a crisis.¹

Canberra's identity as the "bush capital" is not merely a marketing phrase but a genuine cultural attachment, to walking trails, to birdlife, to the particular quality of a spring morning in a city ringed by eucalypts and mountain ranges.

When those mornings are replaced by smoke-haze and fire danger ratings, and when the Floriade flower festival must reckon with changed growing seasons and the Canberra Marathon must consider heat thresholds for participant safety, the social fabric of the city is quietly but materially altered.

The role of First Nations peoples and communities in shaping how Canberra understands its changing landscape is both urgent and undervalued.

Ngunnawal Country, on which Canberra sits, carries thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about seasonal change, fire regimes and landscape management.

Cultural burning practices, rooted in Ngunnawal and Ngambri knowledge, offer approaches to land management that differ substantively from the hazard reduction regimes currently employed, and there is growing recognition among researchers and some policymakers that this knowledge deserves a central place in adaptation planning.

Community groups, neighbourhood associations and faith organisations played significant roles during the smoke emergency, running welfare checks, distributing masks and providing informal gathering points where people could share information and support.

These networks are resilience infrastructure, but they are largely invisible to formal policy and receive little sustained investment.

Work, Economy and Social Services

Canberra's economy is dominated by the public service, which confers a degree of insulation from climate disruption that is not shared across the workforce.

Public servants can often work from home on smoke days or heatwaves, receive paid sick leave and are not penalised for weather-related absence.

Outdoor workers, construction labourers, landscapers, delivery riders, street-based vendors and market stall operators, have no such buffer.

Under workplace health and safety law, there are established thresholds for heat risk, but enforcement is inconsistent, and workers in casual or gig-economy arrangements frequently face informal pressure to work regardless of conditions.

The ACT Government's own climate modelling projects that with a 3°C temperature increase, Canberra could see up to 40 days per year above 35°C, and up to 10 days per year above 44°C.⁵

For industries whose viability depends on outdoor conditions, event management, tourism, the arts sector, agriculture at the ACT's rural fringe, this is not a marginal disruption but a fundamental threat to business models.

Community and social services are already experiencing climate-linked demand pressures.

Emergency relief organisations, mental health services, housing support agencies and disability service providers all described expanded caseloads during the 2019–20 emergency, and the anticipation of more frequent and more severe events has prompted some organisations to build climate response into their operational planning.

But social services in the ACT, as elsewhere, are chronically under-resourced relative to need, and the additional burden of climate-driven demand risks compromising the provision of baseline services for the most vulnerable.

The question of who pays for resilience, and who is expected to manufacture it from their own thin resources, is a political question that ACT climate policy has not yet adequately confronted.

Governance, Trust and Participation

The ACT Government has pursued a comparatively ambitious climate mitigation agenda, with commitments including net zero emissions by 2045 and 100 per cent renewable electricity, already achieved.⁶

On adaptation, the question of how the territory prepares its society for the impacts of warming that is already locked in, the record is more mixed.

The ACT Climate Change Strategy 2019–25 recognised climate resilience as a social as well as environmental challenge, and funded the University of Canberra resilience research, but critics, including ACTCOSS, have argued that policy implementation still tends to treat climate as primarily a technical or infrastructure issue rather than as a social justice one.

Emergency warnings during the 2019–20 fires and smoke events were broadcast through official social media channels and ACT Health advisories, channels that are less reliably accessed by older residents, people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, people with limited digital access and people who are not formally housed.

The differential capacity to receive, interpret and act on emergency information is itself a social inequality, with direct consequences for who survives climate shocks and who does not.

Canberrans who participated in the Salvation Army's 2025 ACT Social Justice Stocktake described a strong sense of urgency about climate change, alongside a frustration that political processes were too slow and insufficiently attentive to those bearing the greatest costs.¹⁵

One respondent, identified only by suburb, offered a statement that is difficult to improve upon: "I want someone in government to care."

Looking Ahead: What a Just Adaptation Might Look Like

The social consequences of climate change in Canberra by 2040 will be shaped less by the physics of the atmosphere than by the political choices made in the intervening years.

A Canberra in which adaptation investment is concentrated on infrastructure while social housing remains inadequate, renters remain unable to retrofit their homes and outer suburbs continue to bake without tree cover will be a city in which the costs of climate change are borne overwhelmingly by those who are already disadvantaged.

But climate adaptation, undertaken with genuine commitment to equity, is also an opportunity.

Retrofitting Canberra's housing stock, beginning with social and community housing, for energy efficiency and thermal comfort would simultaneously reduce emissions, lower energy bills for low-income households and protect lives during heatwaves.

Expanding tree canopy in outer suburbs would reduce heat exposure, improve mental health and increase the liveability of communities that have long received less green infrastructure than older, more affluent neighbourhoods.

Investing in community social networks, not merely as a feel-good supplement to formal services but as recognised resilience infrastructure, would strengthen the connective tissue that matters most when services are stretched and emergencies unfold.

Centring First Nations knowledge and leadership in land management and adaptation planning would not only improve environmental outcomes but would represent a form of structural respect long overdue.

And creating meaningful, accessible pathways for participation in climate adaptation decisions, ones that reach beyond the already-engaged and already-comfortable, would begin to close the gap between who bears the costs of climate change and who shapes the response.

The stories of climate change in Canberra that are not yet being told are the stories of the woman in a poorly insulated Tuggeranong flat who cannot afford to run her air conditioner, the construction worker who loses three days' pay during a heatwave shutdown, the Ngunnawal elder watching Country change in ways that no weather model captures, and the young family in Gungahlin watching their children's asthma worsen each summer.

Listening to those stories is not merely an act of compassion, it is the precondition for a climate policy that is capable of protecting everyone.

Canberra has the resources, the institutional capacity and the political culture to do better.

Whether it will is the central social question of the next decade.

References

1. Living Well in a Changing Climate University of Canberra Research Impact, 2025
2. Bushfires in the ACT ACT State of the Environment Report, 2023
3. Outer Canberra Most Unprepared for Climate Disaster ACT Greens Media Release, September 2025
4. Housing and Homelessness ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS)
5. Developing the Next ACT Climate Change Strategy ACT Government, YourSay Conversations 2025
6. Climate Change in the ACT Region NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
7. Living Well in a Changing Climate: Oxford Economics Global Cities Report 2024 University of Canberra, 2025
8. Missing Middle Canberra: Housing Reform Coalition Missing Middle Canberra
9. Poverty and Inequality in the ACT ACTCOSS Factsheet, October 2022
10. Bushfire Smoke in Our Eyes: Community Perceptions and Responses to an Intense Smoke Event in Canberra, Australia Frontiers in Public Health, January 2022
11. Impact of Extreme Heat on Health in Australia: A Scoping Review BMC Public Health, February 2025
12. Housing as a Right Independents for Canberra
13. Canberra's Living Infrastructure Plan: Cooling the City AdaptNSW ACT Region
14. Australian Capital Territory Social Justice Stocktake 2025 The Salvation Army, 2025
15. Australian Capital Territory Social Justice Stocktake 2025: Community Voices The Salvation Army, 2025

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The Heat and the Politics: How Climate Change Is Reshaping the ACT's Future - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

The ACT is on track to miss its 2025 interim emissions target, raising serious questions about the path to net zero by 2045. 1 After the 2024 election, Labor and the Greens opted for a confidence-and-supply arrangement rather than a formal coalition, shifting the political dynamics on climate. 2 Transport now accounts for roughly sixty per cent of ACT emissions, making it the hardest and most politically contested sector to decarbonise. 3 Outer Canberra suburbs face the greatest heat risk, with projections of up to forty extreme-heat days per year under higher warming scenarios. 4 The ACT Government is consulting on a new Climate Change Strategy for 2026–35 as the existing plan expires, with community consultation open until March 2026. 5 The ACT's climate ambition consistently exceeds federal settings, creating ongoing friction in energy markets, transport planning and federal funding flows. 6

In the last week of January 2026, Canberra baked.

Temperatures climbed into the high thirties for several consecutive days, and in the outer suburbs of Tuggeranong and West Belconnen — newer developments with fewer established trees — residents described pavements hot enough to burn bare feet and parks stripped of shade.

The heat was not only physical.

It settled over a city whose political class was simultaneously asking the hardest question any small government can face: how do you keep leading on climate change when you are falling behind?

A Nation-Leading Record Under Pressure

The Australian Capital Territory has, by most measures, been the most ambitious jurisdiction in the country on climate action since the Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act was passed in 2010.

The Territory hit 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2020, achieved through a pioneering reverse-auction system for large-scale solar and wind contracts that drove down costs.⁷

Its legislated target — net zero emissions by 2045, five years ahead of many comparable jurisdictions — was described by former Greens minister Shane Rattenbury, who held the climate portfolio for a decade, as proof of what is possible when governments "get on with it."

But the ACT's own Greenhouse Gas Inventory for 2024–25 recorded that total net emissions had declined by approximately 46.9 per cent from the 1989–90 baseline.¹

The 2025 interim target required a reduction of between 50 and 60 per cent.

In October 2025, Environment Minister Suzanne Orr confirmed what had been privately acknowledged for some time: the Territory would miss the 2025 milestone.

"When I took on this portfolio, I was advised there was a risk we would not reach our 2025 greenhouse gas reduction target," Orr said in a statement, noting that on the current trajectory net zero by 2045 was also at risk.⁶

The easy gains — renewable electricity, electric government vehicles, fuel-efficient building standards for new homes — have largely been made.

What remains is harder: transport, gas heating in apartments and older homes, and the behavioural changes that no government anywhere has found easy to legislate.

The Tripartisan Consensus — and Its Cracks

One of the most unusual features of ACT politics is its broad cross-party acceptance of climate science and the long-term net zero goal.

Unlike the federal parliament, where climate policy has been a fault line for two decades, the ACT's three main parties — Labor, the Greens and the Canberra Liberals — all publicly accept the science and endorse the 2045 target.

That agreement, however, masks significant differences in urgency, method and tolerance for community disruption.

The fault lines emerge not on targets but on timelines, technologies and the social costs of transition — precisely the questions that grow harder as the easy wins are exhausted.

The Conservation Council ACT's executive director, Dr Simon Copland, argued in late 2025 that the 2045 net zero target should be brought forward to 2040 and that the government risked becoming "complacent" after its renewable electricity success.¹

Orr, by contrast, said she was "hesitant towards bans" that could generate public backlash, favouring "more carrot than stick" — a framing that the Greens on the crossbench view as insufficient given the gap between stated ambition and measurable progress.

The Canberra Liberals, meanwhile, have accepted the targets in principle while consistently questioning the pace and cost of electrification mandates.

Rattenbury observed in post-2024-election discussions with the Liberal Party that "a lot of their issues with the Greens on climate issues was the way the Greens talked about them" — suggesting that the gap is often as much about political culture and rhetoric as it is about substance.

After the Coalition: A New Power Dynamic

The 2024 ACT election produced a result that changed the structural underpinning of climate policy in the Assembly.

Labor retained 10 seats, the Greens fell to 4, and for the first time since 2012 the two parties chose not to enter a formal coalition.²

Instead, a confidence-and-supply agreement gave the Greens support for the Barr government without ministerial positions or the formal policy commitments that portfolio responsibilities can enforce.

Rattenbury was explicit about why negotiations failed: "On climate, we know that transport is responsible for sixty per cent of our emissions, but Labor was not willing to accelerate building light rail or invest properly in active travel."³

The consequence is that Greens pressure on climate now operates through the crossbench rather than from inside cabinet — a position that increases scrutiny but reduces direct influence over Budget allocations and policy design.

The 2025–26 ACT Budget allocated $238 million for environment, sustainable development and climate initiatives — $9 million more than the previous year — but critics argue this figure masks an absence of the structural policy commitments needed to close the gap between current trajectories and 2030 interim targets.⁶

Rattenbury warned that "Labor went to the election with next to no climate policy, and nothing has seemingly improved since then" — a charge the government contests, pointing to its Big Canberra Battery project and continued investment in electric vehicle infrastructure.

Who Bears the Cost? Equity and Electrification

One of the sharpest political debates inside the Assembly concerns who absorbs the costs of transition.

Electrification — replacing gas heating, hot water systems and cooking appliances with electric alternatives — is technically straightforward but financially uneven: owners of newer, well-insulated homes benefit most, while renters in older properties often carry the burden of higher energy bills and are unable to retrofit without landlord approval.

The Greens' 2024 election platform proposed fully funding gas-to-electric upgrades for 5,000 of the lowest-income households, alongside a ban on all new gas appliances from 2027 onwards.⁸

Labor has committed to phasing out new fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2035 but has been more cautious on gas-appliance bans, reflecting a calculation that coercive measures risk alienating the middle ground of the electorate.

The Assembly's own climate legislation commits to a transition that is "fair, equitable, socially just and economically viable" — a phrase that all parties invoke and that none defines in detail when pressed on implementation.

There is also a genuine question about whether climate policy functions, in the ACT context, as an economic development agenda or as primarily an environmental obligation.

The Greens proposed an "Electrify Canberra Skills Hub" at the Canberra Institute of Technology to train workers for the transition economy — an acknowledgement that jobs, skills and industrial development are inseparable from the decarbonisation task.

The Heat Is Here: Adaptation and the Urban Body

Canberra's continental climate — hot, dry summers and cold winters — is shifting in ways that planners are only beginning to absorb.

Local projections suggest that under higher warming scenarios, Canberrans may face up to 40 days per year above 35 degrees Celsius, and heatwaves of 44 degrees could occur as frequently as ten times a year by mid-century.⁴

These projections are not uniformly distributed across the city.

Greens climate adaptation spokesperson Andrew Braddock MLA identified outer suburbs — West Belconnen, lower Woden, outer Gungahlin and large parts of Tuggeranong — as the most exposed, because they were developed more recently, have fewer established trees and rely more heavily on car travel.

"Canberrans in outer suburbs are stepping out to pavements they could fry an egg on," Braddock said during the January 2026 heatwave.

The ACT Government's Living Infrastructure Plan targets 30 per cent tree canopy cover across Canberra's urban footprint by 2045, alongside 30 per cent permeable surfaces — targets embedded in the 2023 Urban Forest Act and the Territory Plan.⁹

But canopy targets create their own political tensions: higher-density development — which the Assembly also supports to ease housing costs — often requires removing existing trees or reducing the land available for new planting.

The Greens' pre-election proposal for a Chief Heat Officer — a dedicated bureaucratic role to coordinate responses to extreme heat events — was welcomed by some independent crossbenchers but questioned by others as an expensive institutional layer that would duplicate existing emergency services coordination.

The political argument for such a role rests on a straightforward observation: heat adaptation requires cross-directorate decision-making — on urban planning, public health, parks, emergency services and social services — that no single existing agency is equipped to coordinate.

Community, Consultation and Democratic Accountability

In January 2026, the ACT Government opened public consultation on its next Climate Change Strategy, a framework intended to guide action from 2026 to 2035.⁵

The process — which runs until 18 March 2026 — is the Territory's most significant public engagement on climate in a decade, and it arrives at a moment of genuine uncertainty about whether the existing policy architecture is fit for the harder phase of decarbonisation.

A tension that the consultation is unlikely to resolve is whether tripartisan consensus on long-term targets dulls rather than sharpens democratic debate.

When all parties agree on the destination, the scrutiny shifts to implementation — and implementation is where the Assembly has been weakest.

Tree-planting targets have been missed, the 2025 interim emissions target will not be met, and the transition away from gas — which the previous Labor-Greens government committed to — remains incomplete.

The absence of a formal independent accountability mechanism — something akin to the UK's Climate Change Committee, which is required by statute to report to parliament and whose advice the government must formally respond to — is a gap that the Greens and some community organisations have urged the Assembly to close.

The ACT Climate Change Council provides expert advice, and the Territory funds it, but ministers are not compelled to publish detailed responses to its recommendations or explain publicly when they diverge from its guidance.

Caught Between Canberra and the Commonwealth

The ACT's climate ambition has consistently exceeded federal settings, and that mismatch generates political friction in areas the Territory cannot fully control.

Energy market rules are set at the national level; the ACT's decision to source 100 per cent of its electricity from renewables does not insulate Canberra households from wholesale price volatility driven by interstate generators.

Transport is the most acute tension: the ACT cannot set emission standards for new vehicles sold nationally, which limits the pace at which its fleet turns over to electric models — even with territory-specific rebates and registration incentives in place.

The ACT Liberal Party occupies an unusual position: broadly supporting the Territory's climate targets while sharing a federal party brand with a Liberal–National Coalition that, as recently as 2025, equivocated on medium-term national emissions targets and threatened the independence of the Climate Change Authority.¹⁰

Assembly members navigate this by treating territory and federal politics as distinct arenas — a position that works as a practical accommodation but leaves voters uncertain about how a Liberal-led ACT government would approach federal-territory negotiations on climate funding and standards.

Conclusion: A City That Cannot Afford to Stop

Canberra's economy is, in essential respects, a government economy.

The Australian Public Service, defence, universities and the diplomatic sector dominate the labour market and give the city a stability that protects it from many of the dislocation risks that haunt regional economies as fossil fuels are phased out.

But that insulation is partial.

A city that is increasingly hot — with summers that test the limits of outdoor activity, bushfire smoke that periodically blankets the valley and extreme weather events that strain emergency services — is a city whose liveability proposition is under threat.

The gap between the ACT's stated ambition and its measurable progress is a political problem now, but it will become an economic one if the infrastructure of adaptation — the trees, the public cooling spaces, the resilient housing stock, the electrified transport network — falls further behind the pace of warming.

Minister Orr's preference for carrots over sticks and Rattenbury's insistence that Labor must match rhetoric with resources both point to the same underlying truth: the next decade of climate politics in the ACT will be decided not by which party commits to the right target but by which government summons the political courage to act on it.

The community consultation open until March 2026 will reveal whether Canberrans are willing to accept more direct asks on transport, gas and land use — or whether the tripartisan consensus on net zero by 2045 remains, as critics fear, a comfortable agreement to argue about the future rather than change the present.

Canberra has led before.

The question is whether it can lead again, in the harder terrain that lies ahead.

References

1. ACT Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2024–25, ACT Government (accessed February 2026)
2. 2024 Australian Capital Territory election, Wikipedia (accessed February 2026)
3. ACT Greens launch four-year plan — media release, ACT Greens, November 2024
4. Outer Canberra Most Unprepared for Climate Disaster — ACT Greens media release, September 2025
5. Developing the next ACT Climate Change Strategy 2026–35, YourSay ACT (consultation open January–March 2026)
6. Next steps on emissions reduction and climate adaptation — Chief Minister's Directorate media release, 2025
7. ACT's Climate Strategy to a Net Zero Emissions Territory, YourSay ACT
8. Climate policies — ACT Greens, 2024 election platform
9. Canberra's Living Infrastructure Plan, ACT Government Climate Choices
10. Election Policy Scorecard 2025, Climate Council of Australia

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