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