and a government still approving new gas fields.
What does the science, and the human cost, actually tell us?
| Key Points |
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Rapid Escalation of Extreme Heat
In the town of Walpeup, in Victoria's dry north-west, the thermometer reached 48.9 °C on a Tuesday afternoon in late January 2026.
The record tied the state's all-time maximum temperature, set half a century earlier under very different atmospheric conditions.
The same week, the South Australian towns of Ceduna, Wudinna and Cummins broke their own historical temperature records, prompting the CSIRO to issue an urgent expert statement on accelerating heat extremes. 1
These are not isolated events.
A Warming Climate
Australia's climate has now warmed by an average of 1.59 °C since national records began in 1910, with most of that warming occurring since 1950. 1
Fourteen of the country's fifteen warmest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Annual Climate Statement for 2025 records that summer 2024–25 was the second-warmest on record, at 1.90 °C above the long-term average, with December, January and February all ranking among the five warmest ever for their respective months. 7
Very high monthly maximum temperatures that occurred just two percent of the time in the period 1960 to 1989 are now occurring eleven percent of the time, roughly six times as often. 8
Public Health Toll
Extreme heat has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard, yet the public health toll remains chronically undercounted.
Heatwave deaths are largely registered as cardiac, respiratory or renal failures, without attribution to heat as the underlying environmental trigger.
Epidemiologists have long argued that Australia underestimates its heat mortality burden by a wide margin, particularly in aged-care facilities and among people living alone.
The regions most at risk from physiologically dangerous heat are northern and inland Australia, where wet-bulb temperatures (a combined measure of heat and humidity that determines whether the human body can cool itself) can approach or breach survivable limits.
Research suggests that parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory could face wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 35 °C, a threshold considered lethal for a healthy adult resting in the shade, with increasing regularity after 2040 under higher emissions pathways.
Urban Risk
Urban heat amplification is intensifying these risks in major cities.
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have expanded rapidly into low-canopy, high-concrete suburban fringe zones that trap heat and re-radiate it overnight, denying residents the relief that cooler rural nights once provided.
Research by the CSIRO and various universities has documented urban areas running three to five degrees warmer than surrounding rural land on extreme heat days, with the gap widening in the absence of green infrastructure.
Australia's building codes remain largely unfit for projected mid-century conditions.
The National Construction Code was updated in 2022 to include minimum energy efficiency standards, but critics argue the standards do not go nearly far enough to protect occupants during forty-plus-degree days without mechanical cooling.
For the roughly one in ten Australian households that cannot afford to run air conditioning, or who live in rental properties where landlords resist installing it, heatwaves represent a life-threatening, not merely uncomfortable, annual event.
The Murray–Darling Basin, which produces roughly forty percent of Australia's agricultural output, is experiencing compounding heat stress on crops, livestock and farmworkers.
Prolonged temperatures above 35 °C cause irreversible damage to cereal crops at pollination, accelerate moisture loss in soils already depleted by below-average rainfall, and push cattle into heat stress that suppresses weight gain and fertility.
The Impact on Construction, Agriculture and Mining
Climate projections consistently show that outdoor industries including construction, agriculture and mining will face growing operational limits during heat extremes, particularly in northern and central Australia.
Safe Work Australia guidelines already recommend ceasing heavy outdoor work above certain heat-humidity thresholds, and the number of hours lost to heat is projected to double or treble across several sectors before 2050 under a high-emissions scenario.
Warming Oceans and Marine Heatwaves
The sea surrounding Australia tells its own story of accelerating change.
Sea surface temperatures in the Australian region were the warmest on record in 2024–25 for the second consecutive year, running 0.94 °C above the 1961–1990 average, according to Bureau of Meteorology data. 7
Globally, ninety-three percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the world's oceans, and 2024 ocean temperatures surpassed the previous record set in 2023. 9
Coral Bleaching
The consequences for marine ecosystems are severe.
The 2024 mass coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef was the fifth bleaching event since 2016 and the most spatially extensive ever recorded, affecting all three regions of the reef with high to extreme bleaching prevalence. 2
The Australian Institute of Marine Science's Long-Term Monitoring Program, drawing on 39 years of survey data, found that average hard coral cover dropped sharply in both the northern and southern reef regions following the event. 10
On the northern reef, from Cape York to Cooktown, coral cover fell from 39.8 percent to 30 percent between 2024 and 2025, the largest annual decline in the north since monitoring began. 10
In the southern reef, coral cover declined from 38.9 percent to just 26.9 percent, with some individual reefs losing up to seventy percent of their living coral near Lizard Island.
University of Sydney researchers tracking 462 individual coral colonies at One Tree Island, an offshore protected reef in the southern Great Barrier Reef, found that eighty percent of colonies were bleached by April 2024, and fifty-three percent of the bleached colonies had died by July. 11
Before the 1990s, mass bleaching was extremely rare on the Great Barrier Reef.
Since 1998, it has struck in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and again in 2025, with the intervals between events shrinking and the recovery windows closing.
"The coral reefs of the future are unlikely to look like those of the past," AIMS scientists wrote in a summary of their 2025 monitoring results. "The loss of biodiversity seems inevitable."
Commercial Fishing
Beyond the reef, warming seas are restructuring commercial fisheries across Australian waters, pushing cold-water species southward and altering the timing and geography of spawning events.
Kelp forests along the southern Australian coastline, which underpin productive fisheries and support extraordinary marine biodiversity, are collapsing as water temperatures rise beyond the thermal tolerance of giant kelp.
The loss of kelp in Tasmania and parts of South Australia has already reduced habitat for abalone, rock lobster and other commercially important species, with cascading consequences for coastal fishing communities.
Marine heatwaves do not act in isolation.
They compound with ocean acidification, caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and with ocean deoxygenation, which creates low-oxygen dead zones where marine life cannot survive.
This convergence of stressors creates conditions that are more damaging than any single threat would be alone.
Tourism
Coastal communities and tourism operators whose livelihoods depend on the reef face an increasingly uncertain future.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park attracts roughly 1.6 million international tourists annually and supports an economy worth an estimated $6.4 billion, but the appeal of the destination is inseparable from the health of its corals.
Warmer ocean temperatures are also likely to intensify tropical cyclones affecting northern Australia, with modelling suggesting that while total cyclone frequency may decline, the proportion reaching Category 4 or 5 intensity is expected to increase as the atmosphere and oceans warm.
The 2024–25 tropical cyclone season produced twelve cyclones in the Australian region, the most since 2005–06, with eight reaching severe Category 3 intensity or above. 7
System-Level Climate Risk Assessments
For years, Australian governments were criticised for managing climate risk as a series of discrete sectoral problems rather than as a systemic threat to the whole of the economy and society.
That changed, at least on paper, in September 2025.
Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment, produced by the Australian Climate Service and released on 15 September 2025, identified 63 nationally significant climate risks across eight key functional systems, including communities, infrastructure, primary industries, economy, and defence. 3
The assessment found that by 2050, Australia will face very high risks across its economy, trade and finance, infrastructure and primary industries, and severe risks to communities and national security.
A companion analysis projected that property values in Australia could fall by up to $611 billion by 2050 under a three-degree warming scenario, as flood risk, bushfire exposure and rising insurance premiums are factored into property markets. 12
The assessment found that 1.5 million people in coastal communities could be in high or very high risk zones for coastal flooding and erosion by 2050. 12
Insurance
The insurance sector is already registering the strain.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority commenced an Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment with Australia's five leading general insurers in 2023, seeking to understand how climate change would alter the affordability of home insurance across the country to 2050. 13
Separate analysis by actuarial firm Finity found that fifteen percent of Australian households, roughly 1.6 million, already face insurance premiums exceeding one month of their gross income, up from ten percent in 2022. 14
The Climate Council's April 2025 property risk report found that 652,424 properties, or approximately one in every twenty-three, are already rated high risk in 2025, with insurance either unaffordable or unavailable. 4
A further 1.55 million properties face abnormally high insurance costs.
Analysts warn that if a significant portion of the approximately $60 billion in bank loans secured against high-risk, uninsurable properties were to default, the consequences for Australia's financial system could be severe. 14
These systemic financial risks are not yet consistently priced into mortgage lending decisions.
National Security
Australia's defence establishment has also begun publicly acknowledging climate change as a national security concern, particularly for northern Australia and the Pacific region, where climate-driven displacement and resource pressures are expected to create conditions for instability.
The National Climate Risk Assessment identified defence and national security as one of the systems facing severe risk by 2050 under higher warming scenarios.
Critics argue that federal and state governments are not yet coordinating adaptation planning at the scale or speed that these risks demand, and that fragmented policy responses across jurisdictions are increasing, rather than reducing, systemic vulnerability.
Political Tension Between Climate Targets and Fossil Fuel Expansion
Australia committed, under its 2022 national determined contribution to the Paris Agreement, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Government projections from December 2024 suggested the country was tracking toward a 42.6 percent reduction, close to target, partly due to rapid growth in renewable electricity.
But climate analysts describe those figures as misleading when set against the full picture of Australia's fossil fuel activity.
Shortly after winning the May 2025 federal election, the Albanese government approved a 40-year lifetime extension of Woodside Energy's North West Shelf LNG plant, allowing it to operate until 2070, decades beyond Australia's net-zero commitment date of 2050. 5
The Climate Action Tracker, which independently assesses national climate policies, rates Australia's overall climate ambition as "Insufficient," noting that the country has no transition plan away from coal and gas and continues to approve new fossil fuel developments. 5
Emissions
Australia is the world's third-largest fossil fuel exporter, and its exported emissions were more than twice its total domestic emissions in 2022.
Australia's domestic climate accounting does not include the emissions generated when its exported coal and gas are burned overseas, a structural gap in the national emissions inventory that critics argue allows policymakers to understate the country's true contribution to global warming.
The Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, a vast onshore gas field 500 kilometres south-east of Darwin, has become a focal point of the debate.
Climate Analytics estimates that the Beetaloo project could emit up to 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases over 25 years, a figure it calculates as 45 percent higher than figures cited in a contested CSIRO-backed industry report. 6
The federal government has relied in part on the prospect of carbon capture and storage technology to make the case that new gas developments can proceed without violating emissions targets.
Carbon capture remains commercially unproven at scale, and no large-scale blue hydrogen facility in the world has achieved the ninety-percent carbon capture rates assumed in the CSIRO Beetaloo analysis. 6
Australia increased its subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major industrial users by around thirty percent from 2022–23 to 2023–24, reaching a total of approximately AUD 14.5 billion, with budget estimates indicating further increases ahead. 5
Fossil Fuel
Australia's major trading partners are watching the country's fossil fuel posture with growing concern.
Japan and South Korea, which together import the majority of Australian LNG, have set ambitious net-zero targets and are actively seeking to diversify away from fossil fuel imports, raising the prospect that demand for Australian gas may decline faster than current government projections assume.
The European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism, which imposes a carbon price on imports from countries with weaker emissions standards, came into its full transition phase in 2026 and represents a potential trade exposure for Australia's carbon-intensive export industries.
The risk of stranded assets, fossil fuel infrastructure that becomes economically unviable before the end of its planned operating life as global demand falls, is already exercising the attention of financial analysts.
Australia has yet to submit a 2035 emissions reduction target to the United Nations, despite the Paris Agreement requiring countries to do so. 5
Climate Policy
Climate policy remains a structural fault line in Australian politics.
The re-elected Labor government faces pressure from the Greens, who extracted conditions requiring Beetaloo Basin gas projects to achieve net zero carbon emissions, while the Coalition opposition argues that energy security demands continued support for gas, and that climate ambition must be balanced against economic costs to households and industry.
There is no credible bipartisan consensus on the pace of decarbonisation, and the policy settings for a just and managed transition away from fossil fuel exports remain absent.
Conclusion
Standing in 2026, Australia presents a portrait of a prosperous, sophisticated nation that understands the science of climate change clearly and has struggled, with partial success, to act on it.
The data points accumulate with a weight that is difficult to absorb: a continent warming at 1.59 °C above its pre-industrial baseline; seas at record temperatures for two consecutive years; a Great Barrier Reef losing coral at a rate that alarms even the most cautious marine scientists; and an insurance system beginning to crack under the actuarial pressure of worsening weather.
Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment, released only in September 2025, confirms what researchers have argued for years: the risks are systemic, they compound each other, and they are accelerating.
Against this backdrop, the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure looks less like a calculated economic strategy and more like a structural contradiction the country has not yet found the political will to resolve.
The communities that will bear the greatest costs, farmworkers in the Murray–Darling Basin sweating through forty-five-degree days, reef tourism operators watching coral gardens bleach white, low-income renters in sweltering western-suburbs fibro homes, are not the communities that shape energy policy or approve offshore gas fields.
The question Australia faces in 2026 is not whether the climate is changing.
That answer is already written in the temperature records, the coral surveys and the insurance actuarial tables.
The question is whether the political system can move fast enough to protect the people and ecosystems that cannot protect themselves.
References
- CSIRO (2026). Expert Commentary: Extreme Heat Records. Australian Climate Science, January 2026.
- Australian Institute of Marine Science (2025). World's Biggest Coral Survey Confirms Sharp Decline in Great Barrier Reef After Heatwave. AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program, August 2025.
- Australian Climate Service (2025). Australia's National Climate Risk Assessment: Climate Risks Overview. Released 15 September 2025.
- Climate Council (2025). At Our Front Door: Escalating Climate Risks for Aussie Homes. April 2025.
- Climate Action Tracker (2025). Australia Country Assessment. Updated 2025.
- Climate Analytics (2023). The Beetaloo Gas Field Is a Climate Bomb: How Did CSIRO Modelling Make It Look Otherwise? Climate Analytics, December 2023.
- Bureau of Meteorology (2026). Annual Climate Statement 2025. Commonwealth of Australia.
- Bureau of Meteorology / CSIRO (2024). State of the Climate 2024: Australia's Changing Climate. Commonwealth of Australia.
- Al Jazeera (2025). Australia's Great Barrier Reef Hit by Record Bleaching as Oceans Warm. 6 August 2025.
- AIMS / The Conversation (2025). World's Biggest Coral Survey Confirms Sharp Decline in Great Barrier Reef After Heatwave. August 2025.
- Byrne, M. et al. (2025). Catastrophic Bleaching in Protected Reefs of the Southern Great Barrier Reef. Limnology and Oceanography Letters, January 2025.
- Western Sydney University (2025). New Climate Report Warns Property Prices Face a $611 Billion Hit. September 2025.
- Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (2023–2026). Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment. APRA.
- Green Central Banking (2025). Australia's Insurance Gap Is a Risk to the Financial System. August 2025.