11/04/2025

Australia urgently needs to get serious about long-term climate policy – but there’s no sign of that in the election campaign

The Conversation -

Jono Searle/AAP, Lukas Coch/AAP, The Conversation


Author
  • Frank Jotzo is Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy and Head of Energy, Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University
The federal election should be an earnest contest over the fundamentals of Australia’s climate and energy policies.

Strong global action on climate change is clearly in Australia’s long-term national interest. But it has fallen prey to US President Donald Trump’s disruption of the world order, which has drained global attention from other crucial issues, including climate change.

The Trump administration’s anti-climate actions might energise some to counteract it, but its overall effect will be chilling.

Election reality

A comprehensive platform to strengthen and broaden Australian climate policy towards net zero is needed more than ever.

But the political reality playing out in the election campaign is very different, with the overriding focus on the cost of living, and the usual emphasis on electoral tactics rather than long-term strategies.

Even a policy like Labor’s subsidised home batteries is being framed as a hip-pocket measure, rather than as a small contribution to energy infrastructure.

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Likewise, the Coalition’s pledge to halve fuel excise is aimed squarely at easing price pressures at the pump. In fact, the policy would slightly delay progress towards low emissions transport.

The vexed question of how to ensure sufficient gas supplies for south eastern Australia is also cloaked in energy affordability. We are already seeing industry push back against the Coalition’s policy to require gas companies to withhold a share of production for the domestic market.

Off target

Regardless of who wins the election, Australia’s 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 will be difficult to achieve unless there is a change of pace.

The government’s projections assume sharp cuts during 2027–30. But national emissions have flatlined at around 28% below 2005 levels for four years.

Labor will subsidise the cost of solar batteries if its re-elected on May 4. Kathie Nichols/Shutterstock


Under the Paris Agreement, a 2035 target commitment is required this year. The Climate Change Authority will give its advice to the new government after the election. It has previously floated a reduction range of 65–75%

This would be compatible with the global goal of keeping warming below 2°C. Yet it might look highly ambitious under current political and international circumstances.

Renewables reloaded

The shift from coal to clean energy sources in the power sector is well underway. In 2024, renewables accounted for 39% of the national energy market, three times the share a decade ago.

But progress has slowed at the same time as older coal plants have become unreliable and costly to run.

It is clear that the future of an affordable, secure power supply in Australia is mostly wind and solar, supported by energy storage and some gas.

But progress needs to be much faster. Many renewable projects, transmission lines and also Snowy 2 energy storage, are behind schedule. This is due to supply chain constraints, regulatory clogging and community opposition.

Blueprint for action

Deep emission reductions can still be achieved over the next ten years, but only if we pull out all the stops. That would mean:

  • going much faster on electricity transition
  • strengthening incentives and regulation to cut industrial and resource sector emissions
  • getting serious about a transition to clean transport
  • meaningful action towards low-emissions agriculture including changes to land use.

A re-elected Labor government would likely do more on renewable power, while also strengthening action on industrial and resource emissions through the Safeguard Mechanism.

But more will be needed to prepare for the 2030s. If the Teals hold the balance of power in a hung parliament, they would push Labor to be more ambitious.

By contrast, a Dutton government might dial back the existing ambition and adopt a lower 2035 target than Labor.

Nuclear means more coal

The initial focus of the Coalition’s energy policy going into the campaign has been to build nuclear power stations.

Nuclear power would be far more expensive than the alternatives, costing hundreds of billions of dollars for only a small share of future power supply. It would need enormous subsidies, probably through government ownership.

Deployment would inevitably be a very long time off. The near term affect would be to delay the transition to more renewable energy.

The coalition’s nuclear power plan has sparked protests on financial and environmental grounds. Steven Markham


The Coalition’s modelling assumes ageing coal-fired power plants would keep running beyond their announced closure dates. That would mean burning more coal and keeping Australia’s national carbon emissions higher for longer.

The future of resource exports is green

Australia’s intrinsic interest in limiting climate change remains urgent. Our opportunity as a green commodity producer and exporter remains solid.

Green industry policy has been on the rise under the Albanese government, through support for green hydrogen and green iron. But we will not be able to subsidise our way to greatness in clean export industries.

What is needed is international green commodity markets for Australian supplies of green ammonia, iron and other products. This is best achieved through carbon pricing in commodity importing countries, coupled with border carbon adjustments which give exporters of cleanly produced products an edge in those markets.

A strong Australian 2035 emissions target would help send a signal to investors and overseas markets that we are serious about the transition.

A COP in Australia

Australia has a strong chance of hosting the 2026 UN climate conference. Labor wants it, but the Coalition doesn’t.

COP31 would be a big chance for Australia to demonstrate positive leadership. It would also create pressure to do more for developing countries, given the conference would be hosted jointly with Pacific island states.

Disappointment is likely, as rich countries will probably fail to meet expectations. In any case, Australia will be pushed by our Pacific neighbours to do more on climate change.

We could do with the encouragement.

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10/04/2025

‘All other avenues have been exhausted’: Is legal action the only way to save the planet?

The Guardian -

Monica Feria-Tinta is one of a growing number of lawyers using the courts to make governments around the world take action.

The Los Cedros forest, Ecuador. Photograph: Minden Pictures/Alamy

Feria-Tinta nodded, deep-red fingernails clattering on her laptop as she typed. She paused and looked up. “Are we entitled to nature? Is that a human right? I would say yes. It’s not an easy argument, but it’s a valid one.” She recommended going to the council with hard data about the impact of trees on health, and how removing the tree could violate the rights of an economically deprived community. 

Recent rulings in the European court of human rights, she added, reinforced the notion that the state has obligations on the climate crisis. This set a legal precedent that could help residents defend their single tree in Southend. “It isn’t just a tree,” said Feria-Tinta. “More than that is at stake: a principle.”

The meeting was just a tiny example of a much bigger shift in how law is being used to fight climate breakdown. Since the early 1980s, communities and campaigners have turned to the courts to fight back against polluting industries. But traditional environmental claims are geographically specific – as in West Virginia, say, where residents sued the chemical firm DuPont for failing to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into their water supply. Climate litigation presents very different challenges. 

A vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal status quo. 

“It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of human rights law to shift to grasp that.”

Feria-Tinta is one of the pioneers of this change. In 2017, she worked on the first case to argue before an international court that state failings on the climate crisis were violating the human rights of a group of Indigenous people. The case was successful, and since then, hundreds of claimants around the world have made similar arguments. 

Feria-Tinta is “one of a small group that’s really engaged in thinking strategically about how to use the law as a tool to push for greater ambition on climate change and biodiversity”, says Margherita Cornaglia, a barrister specialising in climate and environmental justice.

After the meeting with Treverton, Feria-Tinta explained to me how all of these grand legal debates related to Chester the tree. “It is not just that this tree is threatened, but that it’s valuable,” she said. “After the second world war we developed certain standards in human rights treaties because of the horrors humanity endured. But we separated what is human from nature. We are living in such a cataclysmic moment that only now are we realising how vital nature is for human beings. The law has to be reframed, rethought.”

Many observers see the law as the last hope for preventing catastrophic climate change. “It seems to me all other avenues have been exhausted,” says Brett Christophers, professor at Uppsala University and the author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. “Governments and companies aren’t taking serious and significant action, but in theory, at least, both are beholden to the law.” 

This strategic shift also has limitations, since, put bluntly, states can ignore rulings made in faraway international courts (or, for that matter, in their own courts). Meanwhile, it is not just environmental groups who are embracing climate-related litigation. In the US, there has been a significant rise in cases filed by airlines, fossil fuel producers and even states arguing against the obligation to consider climate risk in their financial planning. 

Yet Feria-Tinta passionately believes in the power of the law to create change. As the world passes the grim benchmark of 1.5 degrees of global heating, can the law save us from environmental destruction?


THE barristers’ chambers grouped around the four Inns of Court in central London are the epitome of the British establishment. The buildings – courtyards with neatly manicured lawns, stone staircases and gothic masonry – resemble Oxbridge colleges and grand private schools, and many of the people who work there are graduates of these institutions.

Feria-Tinta’s path was different. She grew up in Peru, the daughter of Indigenous parents who had migrated to the capital city, Lima, and become successful businesspeople. Although she occasionally visited her grandparents in the Andes, most of her early life was spent in Lima, which she describes as a “grey, concrete city”. Indigenous culture was part of the background of her life, but one step removed; her parents spoke Quechua at home, but she never learned to speak it. She couldn’t communicate fully with her grandmother, who refused to learn Spanish – the language of the colonisers.

At school, Feria-Tinta excelled in debating and she ended up studying law at university. Soon after graduating, she was offered an exciting work opportunity, as an assistant producer on a British documentary about the political situation in Peru. She helped the team orchestrate interviews and set up shoots. By the time the programme aired in 1992, everything had changed. In April that year the president, Alberto Fujimori, dissolved Congress and began a brutal dictatorship. Political opponents were being persecuted. 

Facing the threat of jail time, torture or even death for her work on the film, Feria-Tinta fled to the UK in 1993 with the help of the documentary team. “It was difficult to accept that I’d become a refugee,” she told me. “Suddenly, I was at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. I was unprepared for that. Then I thought: OK, now what do I do?” She decided international law would be the best use of her training, and soon won a scholarship for a graduate degree at the London School of Economics.

‘Painstakingly focused and intellectually very ambitious’ … Monica Feria-Tinta. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Adjusting to life in Britain wasn’t easy; she was confused by people’s physical reserve and struggled to understand the accent. But these were small complaints. “I understand what it is to live in fear,” she said. “This was an opportunity to be alive, and I took it seriously.” She spent hours at London’s many free museums and public libraries and developed an enduring passion for English literature – her conversation is full of references to writers such as Alfred Tennyson, William Blake and Virginia Woolf. 

After graduating from LSE, she spent the next decade and a half working in international courts in Strasbourg, The Hague, Latin America and elsewhere. In 2014, she qualified as a barrister and won a pupillage at the London chambers Twenty Essex, where she is still based.

Feria-Tinta’s interest in environmental law developed in the wake of the 2015 Paris agreement, when she found herself wondering how the treaty could be enforced. The agreement set out states’ obligations on the climate but it did not include any enforcement mechanism to ensure that they actually complied. “At Cop each year, states seemed happy to just chat, chat, chat, despite how critical the situation was,” she said. “I wondered whether the old frameworks could be used to address it.”

Human rights law is broadly individualistic – to win a claim, someone has to show that their particular rights are being violated by a state, corporation or other entity. Environmental destruction tends to have more diffuse causes and effects. But in the aftermath of the Paris agreement, a fierce debate broke out among lawyers and scholars about whether international courts could be used to pursue climate justice – and if so, how.

In 2018, Feria-Tinta entered the fray with a paper arguing that even specific human rights agreements, and other longstanding, binding treaties such as the Law of the Sea, could apply to the climate crisis. “Treaties are living instruments – they have to be interpreted in light of modern developments,” she told me. Using apparently narrow treaties to build legal cases about climate change would prove to be an influential idea. But the only way to find out if it would work was to test the principle in court.


THE year before Feria-Tinta published her paper, Sophie Marjanac was living in her native Australia and working for ClientEarth, a legal charity focused on the environment. Her first job after university had been working on indigenous land rights on the Torres Strait, an archipelago off the northern coast of Australia. From the mid-2000s, tidal surges had sent flood water crashing over the inhabited islands, destroying graves and leaving human remains washed up on the land. Rising sea levels had led to saltwater seeping into the soil and poisoning coconut trees. Coastal erosion and flooding had decimated other crops.

For years, islanders had campaigned for help from the Australian government. They wanted funding for seawalls and other coastal defence measures, and they wanted Australia to address the root problem by setting more ambitious targets for reducing emissions. But nothing was changing. Marjanac, who had stayed in touch with elders on the islands, hit on the idea of arguing that climate breakdown was violating the islanders’ human rights.

At first glance, it was not a promising strategy: there was no successful precedent in the international courts. But the timing, at least, was good. Several similar cases had recently been brought in domestic courts around the world in what legal experts now call the “rights turn” in climate litigation. 

In 2015, a district court in the Netherlands ruled that the Dutch government had an explicit duty to protect the human rights of the Dutch population against climate breakdown and to reduce emissions. The same year, the Pakistani high court ruled that the government had violated citizens’ constitutional rights by not upholding its climate policy. Marjanac reasoned that if international courts made similar findings – that states have a legal duty to tackle the climate emergency – it could have a significant global impact.

In the autumn of 2018, ClientEarth contacted Feria-Tinta to ask whether she would act on behalf of the Torres Strait islanders. The team decided to bring a case before the UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with a specific treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – one of the courts of limited jurisdiction that Feria-Tinta believed could be used for this purpose. But there were many reasons to think the case might fail. 

Back in 2005, an Inuit activist had filed a similar claim against the US, arguing that global heating was melting the Arctic and violating the inhabitants’ human rights. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had rejected the claim without considering it. “One of the things that the petitioner in that case said is that what starts in the Arctic doesn’t end in the Arctic,” Feria-Tinta said. “That really, really stayed in my brain.”

As Feria-Tinta immersed herself in the islanders’ testimony, she found herself deeply moved. Feria-Tinta has two distinct modes: one is sharply rational, the other is emotionally attuned to the point of raw vulnerability. (During one of our conversations, she told me a story about watching a brood of newborn ducklings, gearing up to jump from their nest into the pond water far below. “Watching nature, you learn what courage is,” she said. “I thought: if a duck can do that, what can’t you do?” Her voice was steady as she recounted this, so it took me a moment to realise her eyes were streaming with tears.)

Dowar Islet and Waua Islet in the Torres Strait. Photograph: John Rainbird/Alamy


Feria-Tinta brought a fresh perspective to the Torres Strait islanders’ case. Indigenous people have special status in international law, and having worked with these communities professionally and being intimately connected with them personally, she was able to build a powerful argument. “She really helped us think how to broaden [the case],” said Marjanac. “She talked about bringing in children to the claim, because the right to culture was something transmitted to young people – and if the islanders are forced to leave because of the climate crisis and rising seas, it’s a fundamental breach of culture.”

In May 2019, the case was filed with the Human Rights Committee. The UN moves slowly at the best of times, and the committee faced pushback from the Australian government, which argued that climate breakdown was not the fault of any one state, and that Feria-Tinta’s interpretation of the treaty was incorrect. This approach was no surprise. Australia’s prime minister at the time, Scott Morrison, had once brandished a lump of coal in parliament as a sign of his commitment to the fossil fuel industry.

In September 2022, three and a half years after the case formally began, the verdict was announced. The committee found that the Australian government had failed to adequately protect Torres Straits islanders against the adverse impacts of the climate crisis. The UN ordered the government to compensate people for the harms they had suffered and to take measures to secure their communities’ safe existence.

Feria-Tinta was thrilled, not only for the islanders, but because of the possibilities the case opened. “It was the first time in international litigation that the question was, ‘Can a state be held responsible for lack of climate action?’” she recalled. “And the answer was ‘yes’.”

IN the five years between the inception of the Torres Strait case in 2017 and its conclusion in 2022, the field of climate litigation had transformed. In that time, the number of climate-releated cases going through courts had more than doubled. In 2023, the World Economic Forum identified failure to mitigate climate breakdown as the biggest risk facing the planet, and suggested that the increase in litigation was a result of governments moving too slowly in the transition to net zero. Today, litigation is an integral part of the climate movement.

Not everyone is happy about this shift. Recent judgments in the European court of human rights – such as a 2024 ruling in favour of a group of Swiss women who argued that their rights were being violated by their governments’ inadequate action on the climate – set a precedent that will have a sweeping impact on all European states, including the UK. Speaking to a British parliamentary committee soon after this ruling, Lord Sumption KC, a former supreme court justice, warned that such court decisions could limit national governments from making their own climate legislation. He was concerned that some of the interpretations were a stretch. “You can’t have moving goalposts and call it law,” he said.

Within the climate movement, most agree that a variety of tactics – protest, political negotiation, lawsuits – are needed to force change. But some are concerned that litigation risks absorbing disproportionate time and funding. “Donors like litigation,” one campaigner told me, with a weary shrug. It’s not hard to see why: a victory can make a tangible difference and generate a torrent of good publicity. 

The 2015 Dutch case spent years going through the courts – the government lost its final appeal in 2019 – but is credited with leading to a more stringent climate policy in the Netherlands and the phase-out of coal power stations. But litigation is also “slow, expensive and difficult”, says Catherine Higham, a senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and winning a legal battle is usually only the start of the story. Consider the Torres Strait, where three years after their moment of triumph, the islanders are still fighting for all the mitigation measures they were promised.

In March 2025, a landmark trial began in Germany that shows the limitations and possibilities of this approach. A Peruvian farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, is suing the German energy multinational RWE. His argument is that the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have fuelled global heating and accelerated glacial melt above his home town of Huaraz, Peru. This is despite the fact that RWE has never operated in Peru. The case has been extremely slow. First filed a decade ago, it is only just going to trial – but if it succeeds, it will open up a whole new avenue to hold major polluters accountable.

Feria-Tinta believes deeply that progress can be achieved through the courts, even if that change is incremental. “The law is what we have,” she told me, firmly. Yet in our conversations, she made clear that her loyalty is to the courts rather than to any particular cause. “There’s nothing like a dictatorship to make you appreciate the rule of law,” she said. “Try to live without it and you realise how important it is.”

This can lead to work that, to an outsider to the legal world, may seem odd. In her book, A Barrister for the Earth, which will be published later this month, Feria-Tinta discusses her work in 2019 on behalf of communities in West Timor affected by the Montara oil spill, one of the worst offshore oil platform accidents in history. 

Describing the “disturbing images” she saw of the aftermath of the spill, she writes that the quiet of her barristers’ chambers helped her “avoid becoming paralysed by the weight of it all”. Given this strong reaction, I was surprised when she later told me that even after she started working on groundbreaking climate crisis cases, she has acted on behalf of oil companies; in one case advising a company after an oil spill caused by a third party, in others advising on reputational risk or disputes.

Feria-Tinta does not see this as contradictory to her climate work: it is simply the nature of her job. She is not an environmental campaigner but a barrister. As such, she is a firm advocate for the “cab rank” rule, a professional obligation that states that barristers cannot pick and choose their cases according to personal preference. “I will sometimes defend parties with whom I disagree completely,” Feria-Tinta said. “I can still argue their case within the limits of the law.” 

One reason she particularly values the cab rank rule, she told me, is because in Latin America, where it doesn’t exist, lawyers can be persecuted for representing certain clients, whereas in Britain the rule helps maintain a level of distance. (Even so, Feria-Tinta’s stance is not shared by all of her peers. In 2023 more than 100 lawyers, including more than 20 barristers, said they would no longer abide by the cab rank rule when it came to climate-related cases.)

Feria-Tinta’s respect for the law does not amount to reverential conservatism: she wishes to change it from within. “She’s painstakingly focused and intellectually very, very ambitious,” said Jake White, head of legal at World Wide Fund for Nature. As her work repeatedly brought her into contact with people at the frontlines of climate disaster, she started to wonder if the legal system needs to change even more drastically – and to recognise the rights of nature itself.

FOR a long time, even as an adult, Feria-Tinta felt disconnected from the natural world. It was through her long-term partner, Klemens Felder, who grew up in the Austrian Alps, that she began to develop an appreciation for nature. “I was oblivious – but he’s the kind of person to tell me, ‘Actually you’re not seeing this properly’,” she said. Learning to love the English landscape has been a way of connecting both with her adopted homeland and with Indigenous ideas about the interrelation of life on Earth.

This personal transformation was under way when, in the summer of 2020, Feria-Tinta was asked to provide advice for a case against a mining company that had begun exploration in Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Spanning almost 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres), Los Cedros is home to an extraordinary variety of species – from fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears – many of which cannot be found anywhere else.

Feria-Tinta had worked on many cases involving mining in Latin America. But this one was unusual because there were no people in the area where mining was to take place – and therefore, no basis for a human rights claim. However, it happened that in 2008, Ecuador had become the first country in the world to recognise the rights of nature. Its constitution states that “nature, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.

The idea that nature could have legal rights has gathered pace in the 21st century. Bolivia and Panama have followed Ecuador’s lead, while other countries have passed laws awarding rights to natural entities. In 2017, the government of New Zealand passed legislation which recognised the Whanganui river as a legal person. In 2019, Bangladesh granted all its rivers the same status as humans, empowering the National River Conservation Commission to represent them. 

These rights of nature cases tend to focus on biodiversity, distinguishing them from strategic climate litigation, which uses the law to hold states and corporations to account for climate harm. But biodiversity and climate breakdown are closely interrelated. Forests, rivers and oceans sustain human life and absorb carbon emissions, even as rising temperatures threaten their survival.

Awarding rights in principle is only one part of the battle; these rights also have to be protected on the ground. The Los Cedros case, which would be heard in the constitutional court of Ecuador, was going to test this principle. The mining company’s argument was that preventing them from going ahead would violate a trade agreement between Ecuador and Canada. Feria-Tinta had been asked to act as “amicus curiae”, providing expertise without acting on behalf of either party. 

As she worked on her brief, Feria-Tinta found herself thinking much more broadly about what the law is actually for. “Not that long ago, women were not considered legal persons,” she said. “In Europe, abstract entities – corporations, robots – can end up having rights. So what is the proper legal argument against a river or a forest being a legal entity?”

In December 2021, Ecuador’s constitutional court delivered its verdict. The rights of nature, the court said, were not mere rhetorical statements, but “binding legal obligations”. The forest had won. It was a judgment that showed what is possible for the worldwide rights of nature movement.

Los Cedros has, for now, been preserved. But the outcome of such cases is not always so clearcut, even after a positive court verdict. In 2017, India’s Ganges river was recognised as a legal person, but by 2023 pollution had continued to the extent that most of its water is undrinkable.


THE notion of trees or rivers having rights may seem distant from the UK. These ideas are most firmly established in countries with organised Indigenous communities, who see the Earth as a “single, interconnected organism”, as Feria-Tinta puts it in her book. “I suspect many British judges would roll their eyes if you tried to argue a forest should have rights,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK. But even in Britain, there have been some developments on this front.

A few years after the Los Cedros case, an environmental group in Sussex instructed Feria-Tinta to help them draft a charter for the river Ouse. Like many other rivers in the UK, the Ouse is polluted with effluent and wastewater. The charter they produced states that the Ouse is a living entity with eight specific rights, including the right to flow and the right to be pollution-free. In February 2025, Lewes district council passed the charter, making the Ouse the first river in the country to have legally recognised rights. 

The charter isn’t binding, and the next stage is for the council to work out how these rights can be implemented. And yet seeing this happen in her adopted country was emotional for Feria-Tinta. “I’ve come to love the rivers of England, which have been on this island long before any form of human life,” she said. “Rivers are places where civilisations began, and most people I have met around here want nature to be cherished.”

The Ouse near Lewes, East Sussex. Photograph: Peter Cripps/Alamy

The more cases she has worked on, the more Feria-Tinta has come to see commonalities in how seemingly very different communities relate to their natural environments. At the start of 2025, she finalised her legal advice about Chester, the tree in Southend that the council intended to chop down. She set out the council’s obligations on the climate under the European convention on human rights. 

As she drafted the document, she found herself thinking about the Salween river in Myanmar, where she had advised an Indigenous community fighting a dam project some years earlier. Both the tree in Essex and the river in Myanmar were seen by the authorities as expendable, rather than as living entities valued by the people around them. “Whether it’s a single tree, or a whole community depending on a river, what is at stake is the future of humanity,” she told me.

A couple of months later, on a blustery day in early spring, I met Feria-Tinta in the village on the border of Surrey and Sussex where she now lives. Mud squelched underfoot as we walked through woodland, stepping over twisted tree roots, past banks of heather and marshy pools of water. “Back in 2016, I was one of the pioneers doing this [work], but now it’s become mainstream, and it’s a knowledge you can’t be without,” she said excitedly, reaching out a hand to help me climb over a tree felled by a recent storm. “We need everyone.”

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08/04/2025

Global warming of more than 3°C this century may wipe 40% off the world’s economy, new analysis reveals

The Conversation -

Koji Sasahara/AP

Author
Dr Timothy Neal
Senior Lecturer
Economics
Institute
for
Climate Risk
Response
University of NSW


The damage climate change will inflict on the world’s economy is likely to have been massively underestimated, according to new research by my colleagues and I which accounts for the full global reach of extreme weather and its aftermath.

To date, projections of how climate change will affect global gross domestic product (GDP) have broadly suggested mild to moderate harm. This in part has led to a lack of urgency in national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, these models often contain a fundamental flaw – they assume a national economy is affected only by weather in that country. Any impacts from weather events elsewhere, such as how flooding in one country affects the food supply to another, are not incorporated into the models.

Our new research sought to fix this. After including the global repercussions of extreme weather into our models, the predicted harm to global GDP became far worse than previously thought – affecting the lives of people in every country on Earth.

New analysis shows how climate change will affect people in all countries. AP Photo/Ethan Swope

Weather shocks everywhere, all at once

Global warming affects economies in many ways.

The most obvious is damage from extreme weather. Droughts can cause poor harvests, while storms and floods can cause widespread destruction and disrupt the supply of goods. Recent research has also shown heatwaves, aggravated by climate change, have contributed to food inflation.

Heat also makes workers less productive. It affects human health, and disease transmission, and can cause mass migration and conflict.

Most prior research predicts that even extreme warming of 4°C will have only mild negative impacts on the global economy by the end of the century – between 7% and 23%.

Such modelling is usually based on the effects of weather shocks in the past. However, these shocks have typically been confined to a local or regional scale, and balanced out by conditions elsewhere.

For example, in the past, South America might have been in drought, but other parts of the world were getting good rainfall. So, South America could rely on imports of agricultural products from other countries to fill domestic shortfalls and prevent spikes in food prices.

But future climate change will increase the risk of weather shocks occurring simultaneously across countries and more persistently over time. This will disrupt the networks producing and delivering goods, compromise trade and limit the extent to which countries can help each other.

International trade is fundamental to the global economic production. So, our research examined how a country’s future economic growth would be influenced by weather conditions everywhere else in the world.

International trade is fundamental to the global economic production. James Gourley/AAP

What did we find?

One thing was immediately clear: a warm year across the planet causes lower global growth.

We corrected three leading models to account for the effects of global weather on national economies, then averaged out their results. Our analysis focused on global GDP per capita – in other words, the world’s economic output divided by its population.

We found if the Earth warms by more than 3°C by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average of 11% (under previous modelling assumptions) to 40% (under our modelling assumptions). This level of damage could devastate livelihoods in large parts of the world.

Previous models have asserted economies in cold parts of the world, such as Russia and Northern Europe, will benefit from warmer global temperatures. However, we found the impact on the global economy was so large, all countries will be badly affected.

A warm year across the planet causes lower global growth. Pictured: wilted corn crops during drought. wahyusyaban/Shutterstock

Costs vs benefits

Reducing emissions leads to short-term economic costs. These must be balanced against the long-term benefits of avoiding dangerous climate change.

Recent economic modelling has suggested this balance would be struck by reducing emissions at a rate that allows Earth to heat by 2.7°C.

This is close to Earth’s current warming trajectory. But it is far higher than the goals of the Paris Agreement, and global warming limits recommended by climate scientists. It is also based on the flawed assumptions discussed above.

Under our new research, the optimal amount of global warming, balancing short-term costs with long-term benefits, is 1.7°C – a figure broadly consistent with the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious target.

Avoiding climate change has short-term costs and long-term benefits. Dany Bejar/Shutterstock



Changing course

Our new research shows previous forecasts of how such warming will affect the global economy have been far too optimistic. It adds to other recent evidence suggesting the economic impacts of climate change has been badly underestimated.

Clearly, Earth’s current emissions trajectory risks our future and that of our children. The sooner humanity grasps the calamities in store under severe climate change, the sooner we can change course to avoid it.

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06/04/2025

AUSTRALIA: Climate Change March Review - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

In Brief

Extreme Weather Events

  • Record-Breaking Heat: March 2025 was Australia's hottest March on record, with temperatures averaging 2.41°C above the norm. This contributed to the hottest 12-month period recorded, averaging 1.61°C above average. Link

  • Tropical Cyclone Alfred: In early March, Cyclone Alfred approached Brisbane, an unusual event for the region. The cyclone's slow movement heightened its destructive potential, leading to concerns about storm surges, extreme rainfall, and flooding. Link

  • Queensland Floods: Later in the month, unprecedented rainfall led to severe flooding in Queensland, particularly affecting Townsville and surrounding areas. Townsville surpassed its annual rainfall record within just three months. The floods caused extensive damage, isolating communities and prompting disaster support from federal and state governments. Link

Policy Developments

  • Energy Bill Commitments: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese abandoned the Labor Party's earlier modelling that promised a reduction in power bills by $378 by 2030 and a 43% emissions reduction target. This move faced criticism from opposition parties and environmental groups. Link

  • Federal Budget and Environmental Funding: The 2025 federal budget was criticised for its limited allocation towards environmental conservation and climate change mitigation, despite public demand for more substantial action. Link

Climate Action and Advocacy

  • Climate Action Week Sydney: In mid-March, Sydney hosted Climate Action Week, featuring a keynote address by Ross Garnaut. The event aimed to mobilise community-led initiatives and discussions on Australia's potential as a renewable energy superpower. Link

  • Health Sector's Call for Climate Action: The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners emphasised the health impacts of climate change, urging political parties to fully fund the implementation of the National Health and Climate Strategy. Link

These events underscore the escalating impacts of climate change in Australia and highlight the ongoing debates and actions concerning climate policy and adaptation strategies.

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March 2025 was a pivotal month for climate change in Australia, marked by extreme weather events, significant policy developments, and environmental impacts. 

Analysis of recent data continues to underscore Australia's vulnerability to climate change, with record-breaking temperatures, unprecedented coral bleaching, and destructive cyclonic activity. 

This report comprehensively reviews the major climate-related developments across the country during this consequential month.

Extreme Weather Events and Their Impacts

Tropical Cyclone Alfred

March 2025 witnessed one of the most significant climate-driven disasters with Tropical Cyclone Alfred striking Brisbane—an unusual occurrence at this latitude. The cyclone brought extreme rainfall, flooding, and storm surge to Queensland's capital city and surrounding areas. Link

Brisbane set new daily rainfall records on Sunday, March 9, with preliminary economic assessments estimating damages at approximately $1 billion per day. Link

The cyclone's intensity and unusual southern trajectory align with climate scientists' predictions about changing cyclone patterns under global warming conditions.

The extensive damage caused by Cyclone Alfred had ripple effects beyond the immediate humanitarian response, reaching into the political sphere. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delayed the anticipated federal election until May specifically citing the cyclone's impacts. Link  Link

This postponement significantly altered the national political calendar and campaign strategies that had been prepared for an earlier election date.

Scientific Analysis of Extreme Events

On March 20, the Climate Council released a timely report titled "Eye of the Storm: How Climate Pollution Fuels More Intense and Destructive Cyclones," directly linking events like Cyclone Alfred to climate change. Link

The report provided crucial context for understanding how human-induced warming is creating conditions for more severe tropical cyclones in Australia.

Research from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has further connected recent extreme weather to climate change. 

Dr. Surendra Rauniyar's analysis showed that the record-breaking sea surface temperatures observed in north west Australia from September 2024 to January 2025 were heavily influenced by human-induced climate change, which contributed approximately two-thirds of the observed temperature anomaly of 1.34°C. Link

Marine Ecosystem Crisis

Simultaneous Coral Bleaching Events

March 2025 marked a devastating month for Australia's iconic reef systems, with simultaneous mass coral bleaching events reported at both the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef. Link

Scientists described these concurrent bleaching events as "profoundly distressing" and "heartbreaking," noting that Ningaloo Reef had accumulated the highest amount of heat stress on record. Link

By March 30, researchers from Curtin University reported that the "devastating" bleaching at Ningaloo was putting ancient coral colonies at risk of permanent damage or death. Link

The simultaneous bleaching of two World Heritage-listed reef systems represents an unprecedented ecological crisis that scientists directly attribute to climate change-induced marine heatwaves. 

These events highlight the accelerating impacts of climate change on Australia's marine ecosystems and the urgent need for strengthened climate action.

Long-term Ecological Implications

The coral bleaching events have significant implications beyond the immediate ecological damage. 

These reef systems support tourism industries worth billions of dollars annually and provide essential habitat for countless marine species. 

The compounding frequency of bleaching events is reducing recovery time between episodes, threatening the long-term viability of these ecosystems. 

Climate scientists have emphasised that marine heatwaves of this magnitude would be virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change. Link

Climate Policy Developments

Federal Government Actions

March 2025 saw several significant climate policy developments at the federal level. The Department of Climate Change released its quarterly National Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory (for September 2024), revealing concerning trends in Australia's emissions profile. Link

The data showed emissions "still flatlining", with transport emissions overtaking stationary energy to become the second-largest source after electricity generation. Link

In a controversial move on March 20, Prime Minister Albanese announced plans to rush through legislation related to the Tasmanian salmon industry that would limit conservation groups' powers to challenge past environmental decisions. Link

Critics suggested this legislation might extend beyond salmon farming to curtail challenges against fossil fuel developments, potentially undermining Australia's climate commitments.

On March 30, Prime Minister Albanese stated he was willing to direct gas exporters to supply the domestic market "if needed," signalling potential intervention in the energy sector. Link

This came just after the March 29 announcement that the government had delayed approval for Woodside's Browse Gas extension until after the release of a rock art study—which would occur after the election. Link

Implementation of Climate Reporting Regulations

Australia continued preparations for the January 2025 implementation of mandatory climate-related reporting requirements for large and medium-sized companies. Link

These requirements, established through the Treasury Laws Amendment bill passed in 2024, will require companies to disclose climate-related risks and opportunities, as well as greenhouse gas emissions across their value chains. Link

The Australian Accounting Standards Board has been developing internationally-aligned climate disclosure standards, with assurance standards expected from the Australian Auditing and Assurance Board. Link

The implementation of these reporting requirements represents a significant step toward transparency in corporate climate impacts and will affect companies with over 500 employees, revenues exceeding $500 million, or assets over $1 billion. Link

Climate Science and Research

Record-Breaking Temperature Trends

March 2025 saw the release of data confirming that the 2024/25 Australian summer was the second-hottest on record, with scientists explicitly stating it was "not possible without climate change". Link

The average temperature anomaly reached 1.89°C above the long-term average, with researchers warning this extremely hot summer "will be one of the coolest in the 21st century" if emissions continue unabated. Link

Dr. Surendra Rauniyar from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology emphasised that without climate change, the extreme sea surface temperatures observed would have been "almost vanishingly rare." However, under current warming trends, such events are becoming "part of our new normal". Link

Dr. Rauniyar's analysis indicated that at 1.5°C of global warming—slightly above current levels—sea surface temperatures like those observed would become close to average for the region, while at 2.0°C, more than a third of all seasons would be even warmer. Link

Future Projections and Risks

Climate scientists have warned that the trajectory of warming will continue to accelerate if global emissions remain unchecked. At 4.0°C of warming, models suggest Australia will not experience sea surface temperatures as "cool" as those observed in 2024-25. Link

These warming trends drive more intense cyclones, disrupt marine ecosystems, and alter rainfall patterns in ways that directly impact communities, industries, and biodiversity across Australia. Link

Local and Regional Climate Action

Urban Planning and Sustainability

Climate considerations increasingly influenced local planning decisions in March 2025. In Melbourne's northern suburbs, the State Government targeted increased housing density in Brunswick and Coburg, with locals advocating for upgrades to the Upfield Rail Line to accommodate growing populations while minimising transport emissions. Link

These local initiatives highlight the growing integration of climate considerations into urban planning and public infrastructure development.

Electoral Politics and Climate Advocacy

Climate and sustainability emerged as significant issues in the lead-up to the Australian Federal Election, particularly in constituencies like Wills, where a candidates' forum focused on climate was organised for March 18 at Coburg Uniting Church. Link

While many voters reported struggling with cost-of-living pressures, advocates emphasised that climate change is a key driver of rising energy costs, food prices, and insurance premiums. Link

The election delay caused by Cyclone Alfred has extended the period for climate policy debate in the campaign context.

Summary

March 2025 represents a critical period in Australia's climate change narrative, characterised by the convergence of extreme weather events, policy developments, and growing scientific evidence of accelerating impacts. 

The simultaneous coral bleaching events at two World Heritage sites, the unusual and destructive Cyclone Alfred, and record-breaking temperatures all underscore the reality that climate change is no longer a future threat but a present crisis for Australia.

implementation of mandatory climate reporting requirements, the z climate action for months to come. 

The policy responses during this month reflect the tensions between immediate economic considerations and longer-term climate imperatives. 

As Australia approaches both a federal election and the implementation of mandatory climate reporting requirements, the z climate action for months to come. 

What remains clear is that Australia's vulnerability to climate impacts continues to grow, demanding more robust and coordinated action across all levels of government and society.

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